Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed 245
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
When did they die out? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a kid I always thought that Wooly Mammoths died out aroud the same time as the dinosaurs but I heard a while back that they might have been around until a couple of thousand years ago. I now know that man hunted them to the dinosaur date is wrong but when did the last one shed it's mortal coil?
pricetag: $10 million, right now (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink [nytimes.com]
right NOW, we can do this
apparently it would be tedious, but a number of technical hurdles have been overcome lately to the point where this is really conceivable to do, and the talk about doing it isnot theoretical, but practical
1. most recent modern genome decoders don't care that the dna is shredded into pieces
2. encapsulated in keratin (hair), the dna is not so tainted by bacterial dna like it is in bone
3. a new technique allows modifying modern elephant dna 50,000 genomic sites at a time, rather than one by one, so the proper egg can be arrived at after a few generations of reconstruction, implanted in a female elephant, and voila
this can be done, right NOW!
amazing
even more freaky: we can do the same, right now, with neanderthal!
using chimpanzee as a starting point for ethical considerations, we can also, right NOW, bring a neanderthal back to life
that's pretty freaky. these guys wouldn't be dumb. someone would have to explain to the guy that he is not the last of his species, he's an artifically reconstructed clone of a guy who died 50,000 years ago. no one of his kind exists anymore
but we revived a wooly old friend of yours too. here's a spear, happy hunting
just don't eat the dodo
or the quagga
or the irish elk
or the auroch
or the sabretooth though
really really freaky and amazing
Re:Not to mention... (Score:3, Interesting)
The big achievement here is the defragmentation of all that DNA. DNA sequencing typically produces small fragments instead of huge sequences as is often suggested in popular literature. They piece this together with rules of thumb and overlap detection. FYI: the faster the technique for sequencing, the smaller the fragments. Newest techniques these days often produce fragments in the order of a few dozen to a hundred bases.
Re:The only important question (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Mammoth meat probably smells and tastes like limburger cheese.
University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher had a theory that early Americans of 10,000 years ago used frozen lakes as refrigerators to store mastodon and mammoth meat. He tested his theory when a friend's horse died of old age. Fisher dropped chunks of horse meat of up to 170 pounds below the ice in a nearby pond. He anchored some pieces to the bottom. Every week or so he cooked and chewed a piece of meat, and eventually swallowed each bite. The meat remained safe to eat well into the summer. The theory is that as the water warmed in the spring, lactobacilli (the bacteria found in yogurt & cheese) colonized the meat, rendering it inhospitable to other pathogens. So despite the smell and taste (similar to Limburger cheese), the meat remained safe to eat.
http://www.foodreference.com/html/f-mammoth-meat.html [foodreference.com]
Re:When did they die out? (Score:2, Interesting)
Neanderthals would make a good servant race, like in Planet of the Apes. What could possibly go wrong.
Re:Not quite there yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not to mention... (Score:2, Interesting)
You are right that 454 made a tremendous contribution; I certainly did not mean to imply that they did not. As you correctly stated they pioneered the pyrophosphorylase coupled sequencing by synthesis technology. And this is the technology used for the Mammoth sequencing.
I just wanted to give credit to some others which have made (or will make) significant contributions. Illumina/Solexa uses a different chemistry, based on reversibly blocked, dye tagged nucleotides. Pacific Biosciences is working on a single molecule sequencing technology which could potentially achieve the $1000 human genome.
[Yes, I was involved in the arabidopsis transcriptome sequencing by 454.]
Re:Not quite there yet (Score:2, Interesting)
Even though it is frozen, it has been frozen for 10k years, and not necessarily constantly below optimal deep freeze temperatures. I'm not to clear on exactly what happens to flesh over time when frozen, it's certainly safe from microorganisms if constantly below -18C but closer to freezing point flesh does decompose somewhat as all available water in tissue is not entirely frozen due to the presences of minerals. I would believe it if they said it was unpalatable mush. I recently had meat from the bottom of a -25 C deep freeze that was at least 20-25 years old, it was far from fine, it was tasteless and crumbly once cooked, completely inedible.