Genome Sequencing Brings Us One Step Closer To Return of the Woolly Mammoth

 De-Extinction  

Four thousand years after the woolly mammoth disappeared from the planet, researchers have deciphered the genetic code that may let us bring the animal back.

Using DNA recovered from two long-dead woolly mammoth specimens, a team of researchers have sequenced the species’s entire genome — essentially providing the genetic instruction manual on how to build the animal.

Their study of the newly sequenced genome, which was published in the journal Current Biology, offers all kinds of interesting insights into the animal’s past: When it first appeared, when it suffered from population bottlenecks, how it was affected by climate change.

The research, while not the stated intention, does hint at the possibility of mammoth de-extinction. .

“This basically gives you the changes that account for a mammoth being a mammoth — the changes that allowed them to have hair, tremendous amounts of fat, large tusks,” co-author Hendrik Poinar, who directs the Ancient DNA Center at McMaster University, told CBS News (video below). “This then gives us this road map, so to speak, of what we would need to change in an Asian elephant chromosome to make them mammoth-like.”

"This then gives us this road map, so to speak, of what we would need to change in an Asian elephant chromosome to make them mammoth-like."

A plan promoted by Russian scientist Sergey Zimov is to create wildlife refuge he calls “Pleistocene Park.” Zimov is trying to reconstitute a 10,000-year-old pasture ecosystem, complete with reindeer, bison, wolves and — of course — mammoths. He believes that returning mammoths, or at least something mammoth-ish, to the tundra would help revive an ancient grassland there. That in turn would prevent the melting of Siberia’s permafrost — an event that could hasten climate change by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It’s an ambitious idea, but Nimov and other de-extinction proponents, such as the Long Now Foundation are not the only people to come up with such a plan. In 2013, mammoth researcher Semyon Grigoriev uncovered an incredibly well-preserved 10,000-year-old carcass, complete with fresh-looking tissue and blood samples.

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“This find gives us a really good chance of finding live cells,” Grigoriev told reporters at the time, prompting of flurry of speculation that mammoth cloning was within scientists’ grasp. This March, he and his team extracted DNA from the long-frozen animal, which they named “Buttercup,” hoping to find a viable sample that could be inserted into an elephant embryo. The idea is that the embryo would gestate in a female elephant’s womb and be born a real woolly mammoth clone, not just a mammoth-elephant hybrid.

Beth Shapiro an evolutionary biologist , whose book How to Clone a Mammoth looks at the ethics of de-extinction, added that bringing just one mammoth to life would be cruel to both the mammoth and its elephant mother, without offering much benefit.

Poinar, one of the co-authors on the genome sequence study, has mixed feelings about mammoth resurrection.

"The kid in me wants to see it of course," Poinar told CBS. "I would love to see a mammoth population walking across the tundra in the north ... There are animal-related issues of how easy it is to carry that to term and what does that mean toward the pain of current living elephants that might have to do that ... And if the money comes in from private hands, does that mean it becomes a theme park? If these are mammoths to bring back for a zoo, I am not interested at all."



SOURCE  Washington Post

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