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Watch out, George Lucas, there's a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.

Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.

"This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes," study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement.

The researchers used a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a cell nucleus containing one individual's genetic information is inserted into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. Dolly the Sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996 using this technique. Many other animals have been cloned since, but the technique has had a low success rate and attempts to "reclone" animals have often failed.

Genetic abnormalities that can accumulate over...