bringing back a mammoth?

M

MarkitScience

www.MarkitScience.com
Registered Senior Member
not so long ago some Japanese geneticists were able to take a mouse that had been frozen for 16 years and clone it...

if this is the case, does anybody know if there are any well preserved frozen samples of the pre-historic mammoth? and if so, have they ever attempted to clone one? i'm assuming the difficulty would be to find a mother, but maybe using an elephant could work?
 
just found my answer...

apparently in regions of Northern Siberia, there have been numerous findings of fully frozen wooly mammoths with much of their soft tissues remaining intact... of course as temperatures fluctuated over the tens of thousands of years, the DNA in these tissues might be damaged.

however, if good DNA can be found, donor eggs could be used from Asian elephants...

i'd just like to point out the implications if something like this ever happens... just consider all of the species that are currently endangered or fighting extinction. if we could somehow preserve DNA samples from these animals we could effectively use modern science to help preserve our planet's diversity.
 
Mr MacGillivray said:
couldn't we just design some mammoths?
Click to expand...

easier said than done... as far as I know, the elephant genome project has already fully sequenced the elephant genome, or they are about to. but there would be many differences between elephants and mammoths on a genetic level. knowing where and to what extent some of these difference in gene activity are is another story...

if we have access to reliable mammoth DNA, the best chance we have would be to clone it using asian elephants as mothers.
 
MarkitScience said:
easier said than done... as far as I know, the elephant genome project has already fully sequenced the elephant genome, or they are about to. but there would be many differences between elephants and mammoths on a genetic level. knowing where and to what extent some of these difference in gene activity are is another story...

if we have access to reliable mammoth DNA, the best chance we have would be to clone it using asian elephants as mothers.
Click to expand...

I thought that scientists had unraveled the genetic code? can't they translate the rough mammoth shape into DNA and then use that?
 
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