Cloning Mammoths

Anonym Feigling writes "For your consideration... An article over at the New Zealand Herald discusses some of the challenges a japanes team faces as it attemps to develop a system to create a clone from 20,000 year-old mammoth tissue samples discovered in Siberia. It seems to me that shortly after death, any animal's/plant's "cellular repair mechanisms" (for the lack of a better...) will fail, and thus the probability of finding a single cell with perfectly intact DNA from which to create a clone is pretty well zero. Interesting stuff, but it seems that practical considerations (think code rot) would make it difficult."

Comments

Code rot probably not the best analogy

[Quixotic Raindrop]

I get what you're saying, but code doesn't really "rot" in the same way that living cells do. I believe that if there are any intact cells they'd be lucky, but you don't need an intact cell to extract a DNA sample.

Re:Code rot probably not the best analogy

[Elwood P Dowd]

I get what you're saying, but code doesn't really "rot" in the same way that living cells do. I believe that if there are any intact cells they'd be lucky, but you don't need an intact cell to extract a DNA sample.

They had a pretty hard time with the neanderthal femur they found a while back. I think with something this old, you'd need many, many decent DNA samples, and do serious statistical analysis to figure out which copies were most right.

Then again, I could just read the article...

Re:Code rot probably not the best analogy

[bcrowell]

They had a pretty hard time with the neanderthal femur they found a while back.
AFAIK, they only analyzed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the neanderthal sample, not the nuclear DNA that codes for proteins. They also did Oetzi, the 5000-year-old man they found in an alpine glacier.

mtDNA is only inherited from your mother, and is useful as a clock because it's not strongly selected for. There's also a lot more mtDNA in a cell than nuclear DNA, which makes it easier to recover mtDNA from an old sample than it is to recover nuclear DNA. Even though mtDNA is easier than nuclear DNA, they didn't even try to recover the complete mtDNA genome on these samples -- they just used them statistically, as clocks.

The neanderthal DNA showed that our last common ancestor with the neanderthals was 500,000 years ago, which implies that we're separate species, i.e., it supports the total replacement model (we lived alongside neanderthals and Homo erectuses for a long time, and then they went extinct) rather than the multiregional model (where H sapiens arose through worldwide interbreeding with other archaic hominids).

Oetzi's mtDNA was virtually indistinguishable from the mtDNA of the people who currently inhabit the region.

Re:Code rot probably not the best analogy

[Sgt York]

Getting intact full DNA from a living cell, prepared freshly is a challenge. And it does "rot", just like living cells. It's a molecule, and anything that will decay a cell will take the DNA in that cell along with it.

There is also molecular decay, independent of decomposition from microorganisms. DNA is subject to autocatalytic acidic hydrolysis; that is, in any solution with a pH lower that about 6 or 7, it will break itself up into little chunks. Most tissues become quite acidic after death. The DNA is still there, kinda, but it's broken up into little bits.

You don't need intact cells to get DNA, that is true. But to clone, you need a full genome, intact. Each chromosome needs to be a full sequence. For other applications, busted up DNA is fine. You can sequence, look for similarities, etc. But to clone, you need the whole thing, all in it's correct pieces.

Re:Code rot probably not the best analogy

[Quixotic Raindrop]

Code doesn't rot like living cells. I said nothing about DNA not rotting (just for the record).

Re:Code rot probably not the best analogy

[wulfhound]

That's true... the only way to go about it would be to build a complete sequence from many cells (several thousand to get a complete enough picture, I would think), encode it, then resynthesize the entire genome from scratch. The first half of that would require the same kind of effort that went in to the Human Genome Project; the second half a much more advanced development of currently-existing chromosome synthesis techniques. I'd guess we're 10 years away from (a) being cheap enough to do on a bunch of frozen mammoth, and (b) being feasible at all.

Would you want to?

[Creepy Crawler]

Knowing how much just plain elephants eat and destroy, would we want double-sized hairy elephant?

Scitentifically, that's cool. But ask yourself: Why did they die out?

fp

Re:Would you want to?

[togofspookware]

> But ask yourself: Why did they die out?

I heard it was because humans killed them off. But then maybe the story's changed since I heard it :-/

My "t" key doesn't work. Dumb "t" key.

Re:Would you want to?

[mess31173]

But ask yourself: Why did they die out?

Odds are, the reason that they died out, along with around 70 other species of giant mammals around that time is us. Although some claim it could be weather. The article addresses both possiabilities.

Re:Would you want to?

[alleycat0]

The disappearance of Pleistocene megafauna coincided with the extinction of numerous other species, many of which likely would have been considered as sources of neither food nor other resources, thus casting doubt on the theory that humans hunted mammoths into extinction.

ObCredentials: IANAP (P=paleontologist) but i spent most of my life as a professional archaeologist.

Re:Would you want to?

[willtsmith]

I believe the concept that ice humans hunting mammoths AT ALL is pretty silly.

The things are just too damn big to bring down with spears. It's also fairly questionable that "cliff hunting" took place. Today's elephants are VERY SMART and can find food over hundreds of square miles of territiory at EXACTLY the right time of year. If Mammoth are similar in their intellect it's doubtful Mammoth groups would return to the same scene over and over to be slaughtered.

I have produced large piles of animal bones and tossed them in the trash. That doesn't mean I killed the animals. Large amounts of bones at the bottoms of cliffs could just as plausibly be thrown over as trash after cutting off carcass pieces of dismembered Mammoth pieces (from natural deaths).

Finally, anyone who thinks ice age men killed mammoths should try hunting a modern elephant with a spear. Have you ever seen the size of an elephant gun? Even those don't bring them down ever time. Even if you DID get close enough, you would likely be gored or trampled do death after the first poke (if you managed to get through their hide).

Clone

[GuyMannDude]

That mammoth ain't the only thing being cloned around here!

Well, actually I guess this new article is a follow-up to last year's work by this Japanese team so it doesn't technically count as a dupe.

GMD

Re:Clone

[oever]

Slashdot rule #2 and 3: all articles about clones and Duplo should be posted a factor of two times.

In Soviet Russia ...

[Ann Coulter]

... wooly mammoths clone you!

Re:In Soviet Russia ...

[moxruby]

shut the fuck up.

Mammoth tissue samples?

[L. VeGas]

Talk about imprecise. Exactly how big is that? As opposed to what... teeny, weeny tissue samples?

What? Wooly mammoth? What do you mean by that? You mean, like with hair?

The only place to get a wooly mammoth tissue sample from me is my butt. Why would you want to clone that?

Bunch of pervs.

Because... Re:Would you want to?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Because, they reproduce slowly, and they're finger-lickin good ;-)

(Mammoths died out only 5000-10000 years ago- they definitely would have had run ins with our ancestors.)

Huh?

[FroMan]

IANAMolecularBiologist

I wonder why it is so hard to find a full set of DNA.

I'd have thought that we had the tech to get gobs of DNA from all the different cells that we can salvage then take peices, even if from different cells, and then recombine them to get one full peice?

In theory the DNA should be the same in each cell, so if you take just find where the overlaps are between broken peices... Ah, what do I know, I'm just a code monkey...

Re:Huh?

[TCQuad]

It's significantly more difficult than that. You know those nice, clean chromosome pictures that you see in textbooks? Those are actually from actively dividing cells, the only time that the chromosomes are actually large enough to see in a microscope. Most of the time they're not compacted to that extent and therefore aren't very visible. So picking pieces by any sort of visual inspection at that level is out.

You could run these out on low percent agarose gels, and you'd be able to separate on the basis of size, but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a fragment of the X chromosome and the Y chromosome, so it'd be almost impossible to isolate based on size.

And the determination of good v. bad is much more difficult. How long should a mammoth chromosome be? Was this small one cut or that large one ligated? And when you don't know the genome, you're flying blind.

You also can't tell about base-pair damage, etc. without knowing what the sequence was originally. And to get the accurate original sequence, we need living tissue. Therefore, by definition, this is going to be our best guess as to what a wooly mammoth should be. There may be gene differences, etc. compounding the dietary differences that the mammoth will encounter.

The best scenario is to isolate one intact nucleus. Why? Well, if over the course of time the nucleus managed to remain intact, then the cell was probably fairly protected. If the cell was protected to a significant extent, then you're good with most major chromosomal damage and any ones with significant minor base pair damage will be nixed (i.e., the pregancy won't take).

Re:Huh?

[mrkrause]

Also, when cells die the DNA is nicked into little itty-bitty pieces, even when the rest of the organism is still alive. (This happens in apoptosis and necrosis). If you're extra bored look up TUNEL and ISEL+ staining with google to see how that can be used to find dead cells. I've never tried to clone a mammoth, but I assume this would make it a lot harder.

Re:Huh?

[ravenousbugblatter]

It is conceivable that there are cells that would have DNA significantly intact in order to use for cloning. Cells will not begin to undergo cell suicide or necrosis immediately upon death -- they will continue to function for while, waiting for the release of chemicals from the liver and other funs places that will begin to autodigest the body. Cells could also potentially hang otu for a while until they simply run out of glucose (energy source). SO, it's conceivable that a cell very near the surface (for example an epithelial cell, which have been used for cloning before) of the animal could be humming along just fine after the mammoth croaked, and because it was cold there the cell could move into a state of inactivity (there's a reason scientists always carry those buckets of ice around). This cell could then possibly be frozen with it's DNA still relatively intact (keep in mind, even in normal, healthy cells there are estimated to be thousands of single-strand, and even some double-strand, nicks at any given time) and DNA does very well when frozen. So it is possible...but I doubt it will happen any time soon though.

Re:Huh?

[RandyF]

There are a lot of really hairy problems to cloning. And these are only the ones that we know about.

1. The cell differentiation process swaps around bits of DNA code as the cells decide what they are to become (bone, liver, heart, eyeball, etc...) Sure, each cell, theoretically, has all the same DNA, it's just the sequences are scrambled. We'd have to identify each individual gene and it's reliable sequence from these multiple sources to get things off the ground.
2. From the "Dolly" and other cloning experiments, it's been discovered that the actual genetic material degrades over time. The clone may be a newborn, but the genes are as old as the genetic source. This leads to early aging and their related problems. Dolly had to be put down because of a severe case of arthritis, among other things, that crept up at an unusually early age.
3. During the fertilization process, no, actually starting when the sperm and egg are forming, certain genes are automatically turned "on" or "off" so that all things work for fertilization, zygote, embryo, and future growth and maturity. We have NO CLUE as to why or how these decisions are made: what gets turned on, what gets turned off, and why... It's only during this process that the genetic DNA is rejuvenized and stable.

And these are only the things that I know about as an armchair observer of cloning. As I understand it, there are a lot more barriers out there. Sure, we may be able to clone the mammoth, but it will probably not make it to full (procreation) maturity, thus being an effort in futility. A sheep can make it to maturity before things give out. An elephant (mammoth), or even a human is doomed with the current knowledge.

That is the ONLY reason that I have to support a ban on cloning humans, because of the cruelty that an early aging process would put them through. If we do perfect the process on a "10,000 year old mammoth" and quite a few, more genetically close primates, I'll be more open to the idea. That, however, will take a few generations to prove.

Re:Huh?

[Dollyknot]

Like you, I do it in the armchair too. As I understand it they introduced a different set of chromosomes from another cell and inserted them in an adult cell, then gave it an electric shock to induce mitosis.

As the cell they introduced the new chromosomes to would have had old mDNA, I wondered if that might have been the reason for Dolly's premature ageing.

BTW, my user name has nothing at all to do with Dolly the sheep, a dollyknot is a special kind of English truck drivers knot, its called a dollyknot, because it is shaped like a dolly. It is also an incredibly useful knot because it works like a pulley.

Don't always need an intact DNA

[WolfWithoutAClause]

You can probably take two different, damaged copies of the DNA and PCR amplify them up, and generate a protein to stick them back together in the right way. It would be fiddly as hell, but in principle you can do it perfectly.

Once you have an intact copy of the DNA you can clone with it.

Alternatively, take the fragments of mammoth DNA and sequence them, then run the sequenced DNA through a DNA 'printer'. These machines exist- you feed in the DNA sequence on CD rom and out pops the actual DNA you want. It might take years or even decades(!) but it would certainly be possible in principle.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[A55M0NKEY]

Well, I dunno, I don't think DNA likes to work in cells unless at least chromasome-wise it is fairly intact. There's tons of machinery designed to make protiens from DNA and to help it split that expects DNA to be coiled up in a certain way - namely in a chromasome. --
If grocery store strawberries are so big because they are quadraploid, then imagine how big my balls would be if I was quadraploid...

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[TCQuad]

Three considerations:

1) In order to PCR amplify something, you need primers which bind to the target areas and begin the replication. The primers need to have a known sequence, and we don't really know the mammoth genome, so we don't know what we're looking to amplify.

2) Mammoths have multiple chromosomes, so this isn't a one-step process. You'd need to repeatedly amplify section after section on each chromosome. Not impossible (per se), but not really feasible with todays technology due to:

3) Good day, high wind, Herculase (a PCR enzyme for long targets) can get 48,000 base pairs in one cycle with reasonable accuracy. The E. coli genome is 5.4 million base pairs. To PCR the entire E. coli genome you'd need to repeat the process 113 times to get the entire genome; if you're lucky enough to get the max every time, it'd take a lot of complex stitching to get it done. Of course, a mammoth is a lot bigger and more complex than a bacterium. The Fugu (pufferfish) genome is ~100 times bigger than E. coli (300 million), humans ~1000 times (3-4 billion). You can see the difficulty in using PCR for this type of application.

You are right, in principle, that you should be able to do all of these (eventually) but you also have to remember that each of these processes (not to mention troubleshooting!) takes materials (original DNA) in significant quantities. If we don't have a herd of mammoths, we probably don't have enough for what you suggest.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No, no. You would fix up the chromosomes before cloning them.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[bikerguy99]

no offence but all you wrote is total bs - you have no idea how far from reality you are...

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[Red Pointy Tail]

What's wrong with splicing DNA code in from frogs?? It worked fine here!

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[Jackazz]

I think the idea is that you pcr all the fragments at once....so you aren't starting with one and going to the end, you are starting at thousands of places and filling in inbetween. obviously it is very complex to avoid errors and accidental matching this way, but it could be done.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[Sgt York]

Good idea, but PCR doesn't work on things that big. I heard a guy that PCR'd a 10kb fragment once, but I didn't believe him until I saw it. Chromosomes are on the order of megabases.

Also, you won't know what part goes where. It would be like piecing together a shredded picture of a page of random dots. You don't know what a certain peice "says" until you have it in the context of the sequence around it. Even then, it takes a lot of work to figure it out.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Also, you won't know what part goes where. It would be like piecing together a shredded picture of a page of random dots. You don't know what a certain peice "says" until you have it in the context of the sequence around it. Even then, it takes a lot of work to figure it out.

Yes, but that's what the human genome project did- they took the genome, deliberately chopped it up into fragments, and then sequenced each fragment. You then solve the giant jigsaw on a computer.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[Sgt York]

That's why I said "It takes a lot of work to figure it out" instead of saying "It's impossible to do".

HGP took thousands of people dedicating years of their lives.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[Anonymous Coward]

>Also, you won't know what part goes where. It would be like piecing together a shredded picture of a page of random dots. You don't know what a certain peice "says" until you have it in the context of the sequence around it. Even then, it takes a lot of work to figure it out.

You obviously didn't read todays slashdot article on reconstructioning shredded documents:

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/18/1433235.sh tm l?tid=126

Take a few million samples of fragmented DNA from the same animal, sequence all the fragments, and let the computer rebuild a complete set. The computer can easily build a complete sequence from all the fragments. Although sequencing millions of fragments could be very time consuming and expense. However, I am sure better technology will be available to make this easy

The difficultly would probably be constructing a complete DNA set from the computer model. We will probably have develop better tools to make this workable, but it certianly possible.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[TCQuad]

Yes, but that's what the human genome project did- they took the genome, deliberately chopped it up into fragments, and then sequenced each fragment. You then solve the giant jigsaw on a computer.

At a cost of about a dollar a base pair (2.7 billion dollars for 3 billion base pairs)... I don't know about you, but I'm not really a big proponent of spending billions of dollars so I can look at a wooly mammoth.

Re:Don't always need an intact DNA

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Oh, I don't know, compared to the cost of some things, it's not so much.

After all, it's endangered; you don't get much more endangered than the woolly mammoth ;-)

Cloning a mammoth to prove a principle

[Rares Marian]

That's like installing Windows to prove your computer can boot.

Not can do, but should do?

[jpsst34]

Here comes the barrage of "proving they can do it without considering if they should do it" posts. Well, here's a good reason why I'd want to clone mammoths: They'd make great pets. Kind of like Porno for Pyros would. Except that their prohibitive size would mean you'd probably have to hire a poopsmith just to clean up after the fucker!

Re: Not can do, but should do?

[Black Parrot]

> Except that their prohibitive size would mean you'd probably have to hire a poopsmith just to clean up after the fucker!

Smith? Do you dispose of it by turning it into 44mm3r3d 5417 or something?

Re:Not can do, but should do?

[dheltzel]

Well, here's a good reason why I'd want to clone mammoths: They'd make great pets.

The government just banned the importation of Giant Rats for pets, do you really think they are going to let you keep a Wooly Mammoth? Even if they don't transmit monkeypox to humans, if they just sneeze on you it could be life threatening. Imagine the death certificate:

Cause of death: suffocated under a blanket of mammoth snot.

Re:Not can do, but should do?

[Dread_ed]

What I'd really like to see is someone try to clone one of those massively large deep-sea squids from their washed up remains.

Now that would be a great pet!

Not only would it be good for scientific research into deep sea life, but you could also sic it on powerboaters and those bungholes with jetskis!

Editars? Editoors? Edit...

[Jonsey]

An article over at the New Zealand Herald discusses some of the challenges a japanes team faces

It seems the Japanese should not persue cloning an extinct species until they learn to spell a bit better. To prove my case, I reference "Yatta!".
's so easy, happy a-go a-lucky, easy rider, salad, the Ma-all, we didn't eat goo goo goo goo, us us us us.

Or maybe it was a perfectly innocent slip off of the shift key, followed by a missing single letter.
All a matter of perspective. ; )

"Tastes like chickensaurus"

[__past__]

A japanese team, eh? And here I thought HeretiCorp would be USA based.

Does "Kusari" have some meaning in japanese per chance? That one is still a mystery.

Caspian Tigers

[A55M0NKEY]

Caspian Tigers ( driven extinct by the romans ) or Tasmaninan Tigers driven extinct recently might be an easier thing to clone, or Barbary Lions. Something with a bit fresher meat.

ok, lets get this over with

[mugnyte]

..think of all the Inuit we could feed! (tastes like chicken!)

..something new for the zoo! We need genetically engineered giant peanuts.

..a Wooly Mammoth? like your mom in a sweater?

..Its Woulbie the Wooly! Saturdays at 8! This week: sing along to "I wish you'd thaw my maw"

..That amount of poo will suffice for pre-fab housing! You fool! No smoking!

..Mammoth Rides! Spain's Run Of The Woolies! Jousting! Mammoth Hair coats! Ivory out the wazoo!

..Its whats for dinner. and tomorrow night too. and the next...

..Next stop: Reincarnating Hammurabi! We someone with more heart than the current pres.

.."Nature" Journal Submission Title: F15ST Mammoth B14[H3S!!

Maybe they can run with the Buffalo?

[RobertB-DC]

Yeah, that's the ticket. Once a genetically diverse herd of Wooly Mammoths has been developed, we can allow them to roam freely over their former territory. This may cause some slight inconvenience for commuters in Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, we can open up the gates of Oklahoma's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve and allow the buffalo to run free across the vast North American prairie. Note that the cities of Bartlesville, Tulsa, and Wichita will be the first scheduled for "redevelopment" as prairie, with their residents relocated to a biodome in the Gulf of Mexico.

And yes, I know the North American "buffalo" is more properly termed a "bison", but when you're sitting by the campfire eating Braised Buffalo Tongue with Mushroom Sauce, who cares?

Re:Maybe they can run with the Buffalo?

[bobbozzo]

I don't know about mammoths, but American buffalo are not very aggressive. I've been 20 feet from them at Yellowstone, and they seemed disinterested. Much like cattle.

I don't think it would be a major problem if they got out.

Re:Maybe they can run with the Buffalo?

[fuqqer]

Wayyy off topic but... Jeez, I read that recipe link as

www.tripleraunch.com.

Buffalo Tongue, ewww.

Regarding the other response to this parent: Seeing a buffalo in a National Park, does not a wild buffalo make. Darwinism will eventually get rid of idiots who try to get close to large animals with herding and stampeding instincts. It's just a step away from trying to feed the bears or pet the lions. I just wish the animals would win more dammit!

Each sig of mine is a hand crafted, one-of-a-kind.

Re:Maybe they can run with the Buffalo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayyy off topic but... Jeez, I read that recipe link as www.tripleraunch.com.

I guess www.buffalose.cx can't be far behind... but anyone trying to get *that* sort of picture involving a buffalo is definitely going to get Darwined.

Making a hybrid is not really cloning...

[geoswan]

The initial plan was to find mammoth sperm cells, which could be used to inseminate an elephant to create a mammoth-elephant hybrid. But no sperm cells have been found, and other samples retrieved have been rendered unusable by time and climate changes.

Finding mammoth sperm, and impregnating an elephant is not cloning, it is just artificial insemination.

Worth noting is that if it turns out that the mammoth is closely enough related to a modern elephant for a pup to be born that doesn't mean the beginning of mammoth-elephant ranching. Lots of hybrids aren't fertile, like mules.

You ever hear of anyone crossing Indian and African elephants?

Re:Making a hybrid is not really cloning...

[willtsmith]

True.

However, this method (if successful) would be the quickest, easiest way to get a living mammoth (hybrid). Once you had your hybrids you could bank up lots of samples and clone it using the Dolly technique.

Gene therapy could be used to "mammothize" the hybrids. Subsequent clones from "gene-therapized" samples would be even more "mammoth" then previous generations.

Ultimately, even if a fertile mammoth hybrid could be produced, it would take a VERY long time to produce a near-pure mammoth via selective inbreeding. It takes to darn long for the females to reach fertility (which probably contributed to their extinction).

Ultimately, we will have the technology to reproduce a live mammoth given the VERY pristine condition of the frozen mammoth sample. It is a certainty that one could re-constitute a complete DNA through multiple samples.

I think it will teach us a LOT about evolutionary biology (and genetics as a whole) to effectively DEVOLVE elephants (to a common anscestor) and re-evolve them into Mammoths.

Don't forget that modern DNA is littered with discarded/unused sequences. For example, there have been experiments done where researchers generated chickens with TEETH. The information to create teeth and grow them is there (likely from their dinasour anscestors). It just had to be turned back on.

Re:IVORY

[Tharn]

You did notice the name of the Japanese university didn't you?

Sorry to be negative and all

[GusCubed]

But why bother?

Aside from the fact that this would require a superhuman effort to piece together an intact genome - assuming it's even possible given the state of 20,000 year old DNA - how many Elephant ova would need to be harvested, transformed and then implanted?

Don't elephants have really long gestation cycles? (the figure 17 months comes to mind - but I'm not sure about this) And you can be sure as anything that elephant multiple births are extremely rare, if not unrecorded.

How many aborted sheep foetuses did there have to be to create Dolly? OK the techniques may have improved a little since then, but you're still looking at a huge failure rate.

And anyway, assuming you could after this huge effort, create a single clone - what the hell are you going to breed it with? You'd need to start all over again with a different mammoth carcass (preferrably of the opposite sex - although you could get around this, maybe double up the X sex chromosomes if the original carcass is male - but that's a recipe for disaster in the long term too).

So if you want to create a breeding pair, you're going to have to at least double your efforts. And no matter what bible literalists would say - a single breeding pair does not a healthy, stable population make.

It just seems like a huge waste of time, money and expertise for a doomed enterprise to recreate a hairy elephant that died out so long ago that there are probably no viable ecological niches it could occupy.

Still, mammoth steak must be pretty tasty - or they might still be around today

Re:Sorry to be negative and all

[schlyne]

It is about 2 years for an elephant pregnancy.

Re:Sorry to be negative and all

[TCQuad]

a single breeding pair does not a healthy, stable population make.

Actually, this may not be true in all cases. Cheetahs, for instance, have had two points in their history at which the population has gone down to a single breeding pair, as determined by population genetics.

Of course, now it would be almost impossible for cheetahs to survive a third catastrophe of that magnitude, due to their low genetic variability, but it is possible for a single mating pair to create a new population.

Kusari...

[Anonymous Coward]

in Japanese means "chain" as in the things you use to keep a gate closed, to hoist massive weight, etc. It is not interchangable for the type of "chain" used in drive mechanisms (and I think anything other than the type described above), an English-derived word ("chein") is used in that case.

molecules forever ?

[anotherwjt]

I don't know but do molecular bonds have a life span ? Does the energy of bonds just stay constant and young ? Even the little lugs on the leggo blocks wear down .

imagine a farm...

[confused one]

where mammoth's are breed and raised like cattle. Mmmmmmm Mammoth .....

Good Excuse to develop nanotechnology to do it...

[thenarftwit]

Yes, do this by developing nanotech dis-assemblers to take apart tons of these broken cells and put together a good cell copy...then they can clone it by using nanotech to make another copy (who needs the old biotech way of cloning...it's too error prone...better to develop and use nanotech methods where you have precise computer software/hardware control over all the processes)

exogentics?

[tengwar]

Just a thought - humour me! Human DNA represents about 4Gb of data, including the "junk" DNA. The protein "interpreters" for this source code are pretty complex (we're talking CISC, not RISC!), but the instructions for building the proteins which act as interpreters are also coded into this 4Gb - so I don't think I'm cheating too much when I say that our inherited characteristics fit into this figure.

Now how much other information contributing to "you" have you received during your lifetime? There's obvious stuff like the learning of details of a particular language, but large parts of our cultural experience also influence who we are. This can be important to genetic survival - for instance if you don't learn to dance the right way in some cultures, you're less likely to mate and propagate.

It's difficult to equate the raw data volumes for DNA and inheritance - one couldn't plausibly claim that a DVD containing Star Wars was as significant as 10% of your DNA. Still, perhaps it's sensible to question for a communication-centred species like humans: how much of our inheritance is from DNA, and how much is from our libraries?

To return to mammoths: we know that elephants are strongly social animals (at least the female ones are) and pass knowledge between generations. If we breed a mammoth from old DNA, but have no mammoth culture in which to raise it, do we really get a mammoth?

Re:exogentics?

[Madcapjack]

If we breed a mammoth from old DNA, but have no mammoth culture in which to raise it, do we really get a mammoth?

Not all social animals have culture. Ants for example are social creatures, but are not cultural creatures. even most primates are not cultural. otherwise your point would be a good one. However, you do raise a good point, nonetheless. If mammoths are social creatures, even if they are not cultural, then we may not know if such a mammoth would ever be psychologically healthy or developed. A lot of social animals when isolated exhibit a lot of strange behaviors, even to the point of a substantial impairment of brain functions. This is something like that lab mice article except that social environment is cruicial.

4th and 5th considerations

[spineboy]

Well, probably a few more than that, but here goes. DNA in a cell isn't just sitting there all unwound, There are many huge sections of it all bundled/wrapped up around little protein cores which reduces the volume of DNA and more importantly only exposes the sections of it that are needed by the cell at that moment. This is controlled by other proteins within the cell. #2 would be that we don't have any idea of what all the upregulator proteins are like in mamoths. If we just stick the DNA into, say, an elephant cell, it might not be able to understand the DNA.

cloner v cloner

[chloroquine]

So, I'd like to poke my head into this discussion to try to do a little clarification. (famous last words.)

When we talk about cloning an organism it is different than cloning a gene. Cloning a gene involves finding the DNA sequence for the gene and getting it into a workable format. Like a glorified copy-paste operation.

Cloning an organism is quite different. To clone an organism you don't need to sequence its genome. For instance, those sheep they keep talking about, I don't think we've finished the sheep genome. We've cloned mice as well, and that genome project is still chugging along (or at least it was the last time I looked). To clone an organism you use somatic cells (these are cells that aren't germline cells - ie not sperm or egg) and manipulate them (insert mad scientist laughter here) into becoming an embryo.

At this point in time it is not possible (with few few exceptions) to create a living organism from just its DNA sequence. So the goal of these scientists is to find some nice healthy cells within the frozen mammoth and then screw around with them to see if they can get an embryo.

If you could clone any extinct animal, what would it be?

Moo-ha-ha!

[HiggsBison]

Regarding the other response to this parent: Seeing a buffalo in a National Park, does not a wild buffalo make. Darwinism will eventually get rid of idiots who try to get close to large animals with herding and stampeding instincts. It's just a step away from trying to feed the bears or pet the lions. I just wish the animals would win more dammit!

Come closer, closer....

MOO-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Better yet: How about some frikin' Wooley Mammoths with frikin' lasers attached to their heads!

(ahem!) HiggsBison