Word: wakayama
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Whatever the reason, the cloned mice were perfectly normal in all respects. They could mate and give birth, and their DNA was so robust that they themselves could be cloned--and their clones cloned. So far, Wakayama and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii have produced three generations of identical mice...
...Wakayama's idea was truly crazy: he wanted to clone mice, long believed to be among the worst candidates for cloning because their egg cells are particularly delicate and their embryos develop so rapidly. He squeezed in the cloning work during his free time, carefully manipulating one type of mouse cell after another until, just months after Dolly was unleashed on the world, he succeeded in cloning the cumulus cells that surround the egg in the ovary. Wakayama's whimsical name for his new creation: Cumulina...
...technique was almost identical to Wilmut's except for two key steps. First, instead of using electric shocks to coax an adult cell into merging with a host egg whose nucleus had been removed, Wakayama injected just the adult nucleus into a nucleus-free host. And second, he let the hybrid cell sit for up to six hours before stimulating it to start dividing...
...must have done something right. Where Wilmut got only a single cell to flower into an embryo and then a full-term fetus, Wakayama got dozens; up to 3% of his clones survived. That may be in part because his technique treated the cells more gently. It's also possible that injecting just the nucleus introduced fewer contaminants into the host cell...
...such well understood genetics and reproduces so rapidly (up to five generations in a year) means that scientists will be able to study in detail the process by which genes turn on and turn off, and thus how cells become specialized for particular jobs in the body. And if Wakayama's technique can be scaled up to larger animals--a question researchers are already making plans to answer--the research could lead to all sorts of applications...