The aim of the Japanese project, led by Atsuo Ogura, was to find an easily-available source for donor cells so that scientifically valuable animals can be cloned in the future, according to BBC News.
Motherboard also reports that the value of cloning mice is useful beyond just producing more subjects for experimentation, however. It can also help mice with fertility problems reproduce. Mice can even be cloned for farming or conservation purposes.
For experimentation, this is especially valuable to scientists since mice are often genetically modified or bred to carry diseases that model human disorders. Sometimes this can make mice infertile, however, which often leads to do-overs and increased research costs.
The donor mouse lived a healthy life and was fertile, the scientists said.
The process of cloning the mouse is involved isolating white blood cells and then using their nuclei for cloning experiment. The procedure is similar to the one used to produce Dolly the sheep.
What follows is a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which involves moving nuclei from blood or skin cells into an unfertilized egg with its nucleus removed.
Scientists used just ten microlitres of the tail blood, and of that only 2.1 percent of the embryos survived the process, International Business Times reported.
The Japanese team also recently cloned about 600 exact genetic duplicates of one mouse after 25 rounds of cloning. All of the cloned mice were healthy, fertile and gave birth.
The report was published in the Biology of Reproduction.
