
A team of Japanese scientists has cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood,  demonstrating for the first time that mice can be duplicated using "circulating  blood cells."
Announcing their findings in the journal Biology of  Reproduction, the researchers described how they took blood from the tail of a  donor mouse, isolated the white blood cells and used the nuclei for cloning  trials. This process is called "somatic nuclear cell transfer", the same cloning  technique scientists used to produce Dolly the sheep in 1996, the BBC  reported.
The cloned female mouse lived a full life and was able to  reproduce, the researchers told the BBC. They added that the easy availability  of the circulating blood cells gives them hope that they can now reproduce more  scientifically valuable lab mice.