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A mummified foal that has lived between 30,000 and 40,000 years is superbly preserved, but intact DNA can still be elusive.
Credit: Michil Yakovlev / The Siberian Times
A team of scientists in Siberia hope that a 40,000-year-old, mummified baby horse will be able to provide essential genetic material for the cloning of endangered species.
But experts told Live Science that they were skeptical about scientists' ability to find viable DNA on the body, let alone overcome the enormous challenges of cloning a species. gone for millennia.
Relaunched after millennia?
The body of the preserved foal was discovered in August and extracted from molten permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, a region of eastern Russia. Researchers working with frozen remains recently told the Siberian Times that they were looking into whether the remains would give living cells that could be used to clone the old baby horse. [See Photos of the Perfectly Preserved Ice-Age Foal]
According to the Siberian Times, one of the scientists involved in the analysis of the mummified horse is Woo-Suk Hwang, a stem cell researcher and pioneer of cloning in South Korea. Hwang, a former professor at the Seoul National University in South Korea, was charged with falsifying data in 2006 and sentenced three years later for violating the rules of bioethics and embezzlement. who researches and clones animals – mainly dogs, previously reported Live Science.
Scientists from Russia and South Korea – including Hwang – are already collaborating on an attempt to clone a woolly mammoth and are exploring the possibility of extracting living cells from the preserved horse, which could potentially be used to create a clone, said Hwang. The Siberian
"If we only find one living cell, we can clone that old horse," Hwang said. "We can multiply it and get as many embryos as needed."
A mummified foal that has lived between 30,000 and 40,000 years is superbly preserved, but intact DNA can still be elusive.
Credit: Michil Yakovlev / The Siberian Times
An extinct horse might be easier to clone than a mammoth because a modern horse could serve as a substitute for the embryo, while a cloned mammoth embryo should be implanted in an elephant, explained Hwang. Elephants belong to the same family as extinct mammoths, but they are not close relatives – so a cloned "mammoth" would more likely be a genetically modified elephant-mammoth hybrid, he said.
Nevertheless, cloning an extinct ice age horse could be a step towards cloning a mammoth because "it will help us to develop the technology," Hwang told the Siberian Times.
"Astronomical" odds
However, several scientists who were not involved in foal analysis expressed doubts about the possibility of successfully cloning the mummified horse.
"A large number of [the] Said Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in an email.
Cloning is possible only when the DNA of the original animal is intact and the majority – if not all – of the DNA of the Ice Age specimens is generally degraded "in tens of millions of pieces", Dalen Love, professor of genetic Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told Live Science in an email.
If enough DNA from the remains of the mummified horse can be recovered, scientists could be able to build a genomic sequence by comparing the foal's extinct DNA to the genomes of live horses, Shapiro added.
But the chance of finding an intact nucleus with an intact genome, or even a frozen cell that can be recovered, "is astronomical," Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, told Live Science. an email.
"Scientists rarely say that something is impossible, but it certainly approaches it," said Lynch.
Original article on Live Science.
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