Japan and Russia Are Trying To Genetically Engineer a Woolly Mammoth.

Scientific Discovery May Lead to Woolly Mammoths Roaming Earth

This is scary but just so damn cool!

Japanese and Russian scientists are going to try to bring a woolly mammoth back from extinction.

AFP reports that the scientists will replace the nuclei of elephant egg cells with DNA from a mammoth thigh's bone marrow.

Teams from Russia's Sakha Republic mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will work together on the mammoth cloning project.

Because elephants and mammoths are so closely related, the scientists believe that they could have a clone in the next five to six years.

Mammoths went extinct about 10,000 years ago, and until this past summer, scientists have had trouble finding high quality DNA samples to clone with. But archaeologists discovered a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone in Siberia this past August.

The experiment sounds a lot like a real-life version of Jurassic Park, and it may set a precedent for bringing other extinct species back to life in the future using cloning methods.

My feeling on this is one of elastion, this is my life long dream to bring extinct animals back to life. The scary part is taken out of Jarassic Park, when they multiply and find their way to the main land.

I will be keeping up with this story to see if it actually succeeds.

Link here....

Thread already up here..www.abovetopsecret.com...

Ill take your word on it

I see a lot of unemployed sheep in our future...

reply to post by subject x


seriously never thought about that.

reply to post by boymonkey74


So much for the search option. Wish it's functionality was a lot better.

Originally posted by chrismicha77
reply to post by boymonkey74

 

So much for the search option. Wish it's functionality was a lot better.

There's nothing wrong with its search functionality. Its just people DO NOT know how to do a search. How hard is it to type in Mammoth + Japanese? Yes both words into the search box at the same time kids.


www.abovetopsecret.com...

Won't happen....

Weird how the first responder confused 'GE' with 'clone'.

Absent mammoth DNA, elephants could still be geneticall engineered into a mammoth looking breed of elephant.

Has gene splicing tech advanced any in the past 5 years?

even with badly damaged DNA it is possible to reconstruct the full genetic sequence for any organism given enough fragments there is a technique similar to what ancient document specialists would do to fragmentary biblical or other texts. given a enough fragments which over lap you can figure out the original sequence of characters in a writing. this technique was invented towards the end of the human genome project and used to check the results.

also DNA is conserved in all species but especially so in related species. thus most of the mammoth genome is the same as the elephant's genome. probably less than one percent difference. and it is only these differences that need to be found in Mammoth DNA fragments.

this genetic material conservation is so regular that human DNA contains amphibian and fish DNA and any embryologist will tell you a human fetus grows in stages that "evolves" through the evolutionary stages from that DNA. at one point the fetus actually has gill structures. when it comes to Bonobo chimps human DNA is 97 or 98 percent identical.

another way to say this is if humans were extinct like the mammoth you could take chimp DNA and alter 3 percent of it and the result would be a human.

at least at the chromosomal DNA level. chances are a lack of human supplemental proteins and RNA ringlets and strings or other epigenetic coding would mean that the DNA would not express itself the same way it does in humans and thus the product would be defective in unpredictable ways. we are just now learning about the role of epigenetic material.

Absent mammoth DNA, altering elephant DNA will not automatically result in in a mammoth elephant.. perhaps they should focus on the genes responsible for tusks etc?

Ie in domestic breeds even breeders now routinely discuss the exact gene responsible for the folded ear cartilage in the scottish fold, the merle pattern in various doggy breeds, and/or the missing tail in their manx.

Simple as that. Frankly I'm surprised that practically a decade after finding frozen tissues and all that they havent by now been able to splice some recovered mammoth DNA into elephant DNA and develop some embryos by now; it seems they're better off at this point just activating tusk genes in elephant DNA thru trial and error which they probably wouldnt know activate or not till they finally observe tusks developing in embryo/fetuses?