cloning a extinct animal

O

orcot

Valued Senior Member
How would cloning a extinct animal work.

Is it actually possible to repair DNA from animals that are extinct less then century or from longer frozen sampels like mammoths (so only mildly degrated samples).

Is a complete DNA swap from a living cell (from a non extinct species but closly related to the extinct species) possible without killing it. Some parts like mitochondrial DNA would differ but I'm talking abouth the main package like the chromosones.

could a direved fetus developed inside a foreign womb (again of a closely related animal like mammoth- asian elephant) without rejection?
 
It's likely that we should endevour to first locate many samples of the same organism, then once found mix their genes to hopefully repair the DNA strand. If done you'd have a real dinosaur on your hands :D Then we could cook'm up and fry'm right S.A.M.?
 
Last I read, they felt they were pretty close with woolly mammoths. They're digging up fairly intact frozen specimens in Siberia. They'll put the DNA in an elephant zygote and let the elephant carry it. There are a lot of pesky little details to work out, but it will probably happen during you younger folks' lifetime.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Last I read, they felt they were pretty close with woolly mammoths.
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No. With current technology, the cloning mammoths by nuclear transfer is not possible. There have been numerous popular science articles over the years that have played up the chances of success, but they are all purely speculative and the "experts" quoted in such articles are merely using the exercise to gain themselves some media exposure.

Cloning by nuclear transfer involves transferring a donor nucleus into an enucleated ovum. At present, and for the foreseeable future, nuclear transfer requires pristine nuclei. Merely having an organism’s isolated DNA is not sufficient, you need whole undamaged nuclei from the cells of the organism and the nuclei need to contain completely undamaged DNA. The only way to achieve this is to clone from living cells, or living cells that have been meticulously prepared and frozen in liquid nitrogen so that they can be re-animated in cell culture at a future time. These are the only ways that the nuclear DNA suffers no damage. There have been instances where dead animals have been cloned (eg. a prize breeding steer from Texas), but in all these cases samples were taken before death and prepared as I just described. Siberian tundra is cold but not nearly as cold as liquid nitrogen. A 10,000 year old frozen mammoth whose cells have undergone numerous freeze thaw cycles will not contain useable nuclei for cloning a new animal as there will be DNA degradation and fragmentation. Even a little bit precludes the technique.
 
In Jurassic Park they were able to extract DNA from mosquitoes entombed in amber.
 
If it's extinct why clone it? The specie wouldn't belong to any ecosystem if it's long exinct. For research purpose I suppose but overall a waste of research budget IMO. :shrug:
 
In a far distance past (2 years back) I had some biology. I rememberd that women had 2 X chromosones what chould be quit bad because technecly it would mean that all the stuff that is made in cells by that chromosone would be dubbel produced. In nature that doesn't happen because [long forgotten process] marks one of the x chromosones so it doesn't produce anything.

I also remember that
A certain cells especially muscle cells can have 2 nuclei in the same cell.
B certain virusses could alter DNA to reproduce them self
C their are drugs to counter rejection of foreign substances in the body.

Would it be possible to take dubble nuclei cells from for example a asian elephant, replace 1 nuclei genetic material by the damaged extinct species DNA in this case a mammoth whill adding a marker so the damaged materials won't produce anything. And use some sort of virus that reconnects long strands of material to the damaged DNA while the fine asian elephant DNA maintains the cell?
Offcourse their chould be a way to keep the targetted cells isolated and alive for the restauration period but that's proberly possible altough I know little abouth the subject
 
I want the Irish Elk brought back for no other reason than I think its pretty.

I'm thinking the only ones we could clone would be mammals.
 
Would it be possible to take dubble nuclei cells from for example a asian elephant, replace 1 nuclei genetic material by the damaged extinct species DNA in this case a mammoth whill adding a marker so the damaged materials won't produce anything. And use some sort of virus that reconnects long strands of material to the damaged DNA while the fine asian elephant DNA maintains the cell?
Offcourse their chould be a way to keep the targetted cells isolated and alive for the restauration period but that's proberly possible altough I know little abouth the subject
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No. You need, as Hercules pointed out, an ovum. Nothing else can grow develop into an embryo. Also, we are atm quite far away from reproducing artifical genomes. Even with organisms as simple as bacteria it is quite difficult to functionally modify large amounts of its genome (I do not mean just adding or deleting certain areas, but rather a functionally active reconstruction). For higher eukaryotes it is still science fiction. We do not know precisely what to add where (and how to modify the DNA, if necessary). In addition precise modifications/insertion of very large chunks of DNA in eukaryotes is still tricky. Viruses only insert very small amounts of DNA, and they , depending on the applied technique, insert it almost randomly.
 
Why of why do we want to reincarnate animals from the past when we have sooo much trouble sharing space with those that are here now? In less than two hundred years since industrialisation we've managed to see off most of the world's large mammals. We need to get a serious grip!
 
No. You need, as Hercules pointed out, an ovum. Nothing else can grow develop into an embryo.
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True but if it results in undamaged DNA?

Maybe modification is a bid to scifi, but what abouth normal repair functions, would the foreign DNA be broken down inside the host if it has it's own nuclei? And can a cell be stimulated in way's that it's natural restoration ability increases, altough I can imagen that mutations would happen.
 
Would it not be technically possible to "create" a haploid ovum for say a Mammoth, by comparing the chromosomes from a normal diploid cell against that of an existing haploid ovum in a closely related species like an Indian or African Elephant, and then choosing the appropriate sequences of DNA? How closely related would the species need to be for this to be a possibilty? And how does it work in nature, meaning how does an ovum or spermatazoa become haploid in the first place?
 
Ancient DNA is not simply slightly damaged, but missing huge chunks of information. No normal repair mechanism can cope with it, as there is no blue print (at least one intact strand) available anymore. Our current technology is not at the stage to create artificial, functional (live-sustaining) chromosomes, which can fill the gaps (as was envisioned in the movie "Jurassic Park").
BACs or YACs do not count (if you happen to google them), as these are merely library vessels for sequencing reactions.

Would it not be technically possible to "create" a haploid ovum
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I am not quite sure what you mean. All gametes prior to fusion with another one (ovum and sperm cells) are haploid. Only after fusion a diploid zygote is formed.
A fusion between a, say, elephant egg and a mammoth sperm (or vice versa) won't happen. Even if they were close enough, the mammoth gamete wouldn't be functional.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6284214.stm
I'm hoping they find usable DNA in this one

Baby mammoth discovery unveiled

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.

The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.

The animal's trunk and eyes are still intact and some of its fur remains on the body.

In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery

Alexei Tikhonov, Russian Academy of Sciences
Mammoths are an extinct member of the elephant family. Adults often possessed long, curved tusks and a coat of long hair.

The 130cm (4ft 3ins) tall, 50kg Siberian specimen dates to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great beasts were vanishing from the planet.

It was discovered by a reindeer herder in May this year. Yuri Khudi stumbled across the carcass near the Yuribei River, in Russia's Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Last week, an international delegation of experts convened in the town of Salekhard, near the discovery site, to carry out a preliminary examination of the animal.

"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the delegation.

"In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery," he said.

Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs research centre in South Dakota, US, said: "To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare." Dr Agenbroad added that he knew of only three other examples.

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth.

Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning.

"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News....
 
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