It appears that
efforts to clone a mammoth are leaping ahead.
Here we have excellent source material and if it can be done at all
directly from frozen remains of this age, then this is certainly the best
chance.
They have blood,
liver tissue and surely just about everything else to work with. They may even have ovarian eggs as well. The carcass is clearly that good.
Without question
restoring the mammoth is our best first chance in terms of species resurrection
before we are forced to focus on outright genome reconstruction from aged and
badly degraded samples sitting in our museums.
I have no doubt that we are going there as well sooner than later. We will see the dodo again as sell as many others.
Siberian
scientists announce they now have a 'high chance' to clone the woolly mammoth
By Anna Liesowska
13 March 2014
Discovery
of blood in creature frozen for 43,000 years is seen as major breakthrough by
international team.
The
experts believe they will be able to extract high quality DNA from the remains
which have undergone a unique autopsy in Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Repblic,
also called Yakutia. There was palpable excitement among the team which
included scientists from Russia, the UK, the USA, Denmark, South Korea and
Moldova.
Radik
Khayrullin, vice president of the Russian Association of Medical
Anthropologists, said in Yakutsk: 'The data we are about to receive will give
us a high chance to clone the mammoth.'
He
immediately called for responsibility in bringing the ancient beast - a native
of Siberia - back to life, urging that this is not done to play God.
'We
must have a reason to do this, as it is one thing to clone it for scientific
purpose, and another to clone for the sake of curiosity'.
But
theoretically the possibility exists that this female mammoth will become the
parent of the first of the species to walk the planet.
Mr
Khayrullin also acknowledged that the mammoth cannot be identical to the
creatures that become extinct between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago.
'It
will be a different mammoth to the one living 43,000 years ago, specially
taking into account that there will be interbreeding with a female elephant.'
If
and when experiments begin, an elephant will be the surrogate mother, enabling
the species to be brought back from the dead.
Viktoria
Egorova, chief of the Research and Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory of the
Medical Clinic of North-Eastern Federal University, said: 'We have dissected
the soft tissues of the mammoth - and I must say that we didn't expect such
results. The carcass that is more than 43,000 years old has preserved
better than a body of a human buried for six months.
'The
tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels
there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found
erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved.
'We
have also obtained very well visualised migrating cells of the lymphoid tissue,
which is another great discovery.
'The
upper part of the carcass has been eaten by animals, yet the lower part with
the legs and, astonishingly, the trunk are very well preserved.
'We
also have the mammoth's liver - very well preserved, too, and looks like with
some solid fragments inside it. We haven't managed to study them yet, but the
first suggestion is that possibly these are kidney stones.
'Another
discovery was intestines with remains of the vegetation the mammoth ate before
its death, and a multi-chambered stomach what we've been working with today,
collecting tissue samples. There is a lot more material that will have to go
through laboratory research'.
Remarkably
the state of the blood allows the scientists to travel back in time to
understand cicrumstances of the mammoth's death.
As
Radik Khayrullin said, 'the blood we have obtained is 'agonised' - which means
that the mammoth died an unnatural death, it must have been in agony for 16, 18
hours. This is also confirmed by the position of the body, with its back
leg stretched in an unnatural way.
'We
think this was a female mammoth that fell into an ice hole and couldn't
escape'.
The
mammoth remains were far older than experts believed when they first dug the
carcass from the permafrost in the north of the Sakha Repiblic.
It
was believed to be aged around 10,000 years old but tests by Alexei Tikhonov,
deputy director of the Zoological Institute, St Petersburg, indicated around
43,000 years old.
Semyon
Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, part of the Institute of
Applied Ecology of the North at the North Eastern Federal University, told The
Siberian Times: 'We are still up to our eye in work, we will finish today's
laboratory works by about 7 pm.'
He
said works had been done on the stomach and digestive system. The autopsy will
finish on 15 March, and by May scientists aim to hold a conference in Greece to
announce the results of their work. The Siberian Times has previously covered reports about the carcass
which was originally found in May 2013 on Malolyakhovskiy island and
transported in a frozen condition to remote Kazachiy, in the north of the Sakha
Republic, where it was initially examined by the international team.
The
same month we reported that a blood sample had been found and in September 2013
another story revealed the existence of the best preserved trunk ever
found. Initially, it was claimed that the blood tests had 'no clear results'
and it is known samples were sent to University of Manitoba, Aarhus University,
and Lund University, as well as to South Korea for further research.
'We
took it out of the icehouse and it just laid outdoors,' said Dr Grigoriev,
explaining the moment when the experts had the chance to scrutinise the mammoth
remains for the first time. 'For three days, it didn't fully melt, but we
didn't need this. It was important to save some part of the biological material
frozen inside. The trunk was detached from the beginning. It melted
faster.
'We
thawed it for one day, but not completely, of course. We cleaned it and froze
it again. The trunk is the most valuable part of the remains at the
moment.
'We
understood this when we saw the red soft tissues inside. It looked like the
meat of a freshly killed animal. It is red and we can see the muscle.
'It
smells like not very fresh meat. Sometimes the corpse remains of ancient
animals are so decomposed that the smell is unbearable. It all depends on the
preservation, here it was better and the smell was not so strong'.
Grigoriev
described the 'excitement, the feeling of discovery, when every minute, every
hour brings something new' as the scientists examined the frozen
remains. He said in September 2013: 'Everybody is talking about about
cloning, but we should understand that it is a very complicated task. Of
course, we hope to find so called 'living cell' in the samples. That means we
can get the least damaged DNA and first of all - nuclear DNA. But this is only
a midway point.
'The
next question is how to use an elephant in the cloning process. The
evolutionary path of the mammoth and the elephant diverged a long time ago. So
even if we could get a 'living cell' we need to have a special method of
cloning. The Koreans are working on getting the clones from different species,
but, you see, it is not so fast. If we do not get 'living cell', we will
have a longer route. Then we should create artificial DNA, it could take 50 or
60 years.
'Apart
from cloning, these samples will give us an opportunity to completely decode
the DNA of the mammoth, and we will be able to decipher the nuclear DNA, which
stores a lot of information.
'So
we have a unique opportunity to understand how the mammoth's blood system
worked, its muscles and the trunk. Of course, we are engaged primarily in
fundamental science. It is important to us to learn all possible details about
mammoth. Maybe our findings will be used by applied science, but now it is
early to think of it. And I repeat once again that cloning - despite our
discovery, it is a very distant prospect, involving years and decades of work'.
The
creature was believed to be aged around 50 or 60 when it died.
The
mammoth disappeared from Siberia at the end of the Pleistocene period some
10,000 years ago in circumstances that are a matter of scientific debate.
Climate
change and hunting by humans may have been factors. An isolated population of
the creature survived on Wrangel Island until around 4,000 years ago.
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