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You know the story. Guy extracts the DNA of dinosaurs from a fossilized mosquito. Dinosaur eggs hatch. The prehistoric theme park makes its appearance and becomes a huge handicap. Dinosaurs still live.
Although this may not yet happen, scientists have successfully reactivated the cells of a woolly mammoth that died 28,000 years ago. A bit like dino DNA in Jurassic Park was injected into frog eggs or oocytes, mammoth cell nuclei were injected into mouse oocytes according to a process called nuclear transfer. They managed to survive temporarily, which now proves that the genes of extinct creatures can be reactivated, if only for a moment.
A team of Japanese researchers led by biologist Kazuo Yamagata was able to extract viable genetic material from a young woolly mammoth known as Yuka. It was discovered in 2010 under permafrost on the coast of Dmitry Laptev Strait, in the far east of Russia. While the body lacked many vital bones and organs, there was enough material in which its genetic code had been preserved since the last ice age.
"Ancient species provide valuable information on the genetic basis of adaptive evolution and extinction factors," said Yamagata and colleagues in a recently published study in Nature.
Yamagata and his team had already tried to resuscitate mammoth cells – a mummified specimen almost twice as old as Yuka – but without success. Yuka was in such an incredible state, at least for something that had been dragging in the ice for nearly thirty centuries, that she was able to extract the nuclei from her muscle tissue and implant them into oocytes of mouse. They turned into zombie cells. Kind of.
The mammoth cells were unable to divide, which would be vital for the production of a mammoth embryo, but it is almost as amazing that they are still able to go through certain phases of predivision. They went up to the pin assembly, a process in which the chromosomes are properly attached to the pin structures before division of a cell.
If cell division fails on a mummy, this question begs the question whether the disappearance (at least species that will not try to eat us alive like some gigantic lizards Jurassic Park) will really be possible.
"The results presented here clearly show the de facto impossibility of cloning the mammoth by current methods. [nuclear transfer] Yamagata admitted that "this approach paves the way for the evaluation of biological activities of the kernels of extinct animal species".
So, we may not see Ice Age Park anytime soon, but bringing back even the cells of creatures that have followed the mammoth's path is science fiction.
(via the motherboard)
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