| Title | Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs | |
| Date | Friday March 15 2019, @02:37PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the an-old-piano-in-a-tree dept. | ||
If you remember in 2017, it was predicted Resurrection of the Woolly Mammoth Could Begin in Two Years.
Well it's 2019, and now that it is two years later... and so they have, of course, accomplished nothing of the sort are working on it.
[...] researchers extracted cells from Yuka, a woolly mammoth mummy (Mammuthus primigenius) whose remains were discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2011. Then, the scientists recovered the least-damaged nuclei (structures that contain genetic material) from each cell and popped the nuclei into mouse eggs.
At first, this maneuver "activated" the mammoth chromosomes, as several biological reactions that occur before cell division actually happened within the mouse cell. But these reactions soon came to a crashing halt, probably, in part, because the mammoth DNA was severely damaged after spending 28,000 years buried in permafrost, the researchers said.
Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not part of the study, commented:
at first, the cellular machinery did try to fix damaged DNA within the chromosomes and piece together the broken bits [...] "But [the egg] can only do so much, [...] When the nuclei are badly damaged, then it's just not possible to reconstitute this to what you would need to do to actually bring it back to life."
According to Shapiro:
"The results presented here clearly show us again the de facto impossibility to clone the mammoth by current NT [nuclear-transfer] technology," the researchers wrote in the study, published online March 11 in the journal Scientific Reports.
However that does not mean all is lost,
Other research groups are also trying to resurrect the mammoth, using different technology. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is heading the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, is taking one approach. He's using CRISPR — a tool that can edit DNA's bases, or letters — to insert woolly mammoth genes into the DNA of Asian elephants, which are closely related to the extinct animals.
All of this is not without the usual controversies, but it will certainly be an accomplishment should they succeed.
For those who are unaware, there is a nibble of truth to Pliny the Elder's assertion in A.D. 77 that Elephants hate mice, as it turns out Elephants will definitely avoid the heck out of mice in the wild.
Considering the close relationship of elephants and mammoths, perhaps mixing their bits together with mice is not the best approach?
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printed from SoylentNews, Mammoth DNA Activates Briefly in Mouse Eggs on 2024-04-18 11:59:43