Board Thread:Theories and Speculation/@comment-25122992-20170404175224/@comment-734582-20170408082745

Starscream1998 wrote: The reason why Madara did not retain the Rinnegan when he became a real living being again is because those eyes were the result of the reanimation jutsu and were not his real eyes which he gave to Nagato prior to his death it's as simple as that. The Rinnegan are incredibly powerful eyes, the genuine article cannot be replicated. This doesn't explain why he retains Hashirama's cells, as they weren't his own cells.

Hence why i said earlier: Rinne Tensei can restore anything you target to it's living form, provided that that living form doesn't exist anywhere else. Any cells Kabuto stuck to him were probably part of the Edo Tensei and so dead. So Rinne Tensei can revive those cells. Madara's body was dead, so it can revive that body. Madara's soul was in the afterlife, so it was available to be revived. The only thing not present were Madara's eyes, as the piece of soul in them was still present in Obito's eye socket and in a plastic bag.

Edo Tensei needs information, but it's not necessarily DNA alone. Tissue but also regular information seems to work (IE knowledge of how they looked apparently allows you to better represent them, as Orochimaru did verus Hiruzen). A few stray cells from the Rinnegan that remained in Madara's eye may have been enough data to create fake rinnegan. It's not clear if information quality influences Edo Tensei quality, IE without enough DNA you can't accurately recreate something, say Madara's full Rinnegan powers or his Mangekyou abilities.