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Scientists Recover Wooly Mammoth Blood
westtxfun writes
"'Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.' As scientists unearthed the recent find, very dark blood flowed out from beneath the mammoth, and the muscle tissue was red. This is the best-preserved specimen found so far and they are hopeful they can recover DNA and clone a mammoth. Semyon Grigoriev, one of the researchers, said, 'The approximate age of this animal is about 10,000 years old. It has been preserved thanks to the special conditions, due to the fact that it did not defrost and then freeze again. We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free herself and died. Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well. The upper torso and two legs, which were in the soil, were gnawed by prehistoric and modern predators and almost did not survive.'"
Tiger blood is just so passe now.
"the muscle tissue was red" I can't wait for the photo op of Putin eating a mammoth steak, cooked rare. People could at least take that more seriously than his flight with the cranes.
Wooly mammoth vacuum cleaners, wooly mammoth shower heads, the possibilities for the modern stone age family are endless...
There is obviously some money for the research, and a zoo would bring in enough revenue to help offset research costs, but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth? $20M? $50M? That would go a long way in funding further research. Even better: to do so with stone age weapons.
The contract could stipulate that the researchers still own the carcass, and therefore could profit from auctioning the hide or the ivory. Of course, it would be a long time after cloning until such an endeavor was even worthwhile.
Warning: The first paragraph of the following book review may cause you to giggle uncontrollably, stab yourself with a toothpick, or suffer other calamity whilst reading at work. Good luck explaining yourself when the office security team calls you into their office.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/richard-fortey/down-to-the-last-flea
now buy a island and open a zoo any on have some dino DNA?
Quaternary Park
What kind of 2-bit "internet hero" are you to think that, because your managed managed to reach nature.com, you now know more about DNA and cloning than the chief scientist Semyon Grigoryev, professor at North-East Federal University?
They grew up on Michael Crichton. "It's full of holes. Now that's where our geneticists take over!"
The kind that can do math? From that very article:
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
Emphasis mine.
So 10K years -- enough material and it should certainly be possible.
You don't need a full piece of DNA, just lots of small pieces you can combine into a full one. While I appreciate that posting on /. gives you the ability to second guess any amount of considered research and scientific understanding, from time to time reality does kick in.
Rule 34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
Rule 35: If no porn is found at the moment, it will be made.
isn't that assuming that it isn't frozen?
The half life of all DNA is 521 years.
Did you even READ that article?
"After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate."
So, that 'half life' is for buried bones in fairly specific situations. It doesn't apply everywhere.
Best part of all, is that story you linked to has its own related stories, and the first link is another story where they recovered DNA from 19,000 year old eggshells.
The second link is a story about sequencing the DNA from 100,000+ year old polar bears. Where the 'cold DRY' environment allows DNA to be preserved.
Interesting link there. The DNA studied in the story at the link sat at a temperature of 13.1 C. That is quite a bit above freezing, and temperature is a key aspect of speeding up aging. The oldest DNA sequenced is quite a bit older than 10,000 years (from your link)..
“We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.. --- DNA has a 521-year half-life
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
What kind of 2-bit "internet hero" are you to think that, because your managed managed to reach nature.com, you now know more about DNA and cloning than the chief scientist Semyon Grigoryev, professor at North-East Federal University?
Hey, since when do we on Slashdot let the facts get in the way of a good argument?
It doesn't matter how old it is, as long as there's enough frog DNA to fill in the gaps.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
From your source:
"The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information."
So 10k years... easy
I bet that smelled amazing!
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
What kind of 2-bit "scientists" are these that think they can clone an animal that died 10,000 years ago?
I'm going to assume they're the kind with degrees and an understanding of what "half-life" means, as opposed to the armchair kind who like to make themselves feel smarter than everyone else by crapping from on high on any article proclaiming the promise of advancing human knowledge by Googling around for the first article that even remotely appears to undermine the latest claim.
Perhaps you should have dug a little deeper than the first article you found that supported your implied hypothesis. You didn't even have to look very far, since just one click from the article you linked to, you could have found the following:
DNA from a 110,000–130,000-year-old polar-bear fossil has been successfully sequenced.
Interestingly, there is no direct association between the age of a sample and the state of its DNA.
The eggs were between 400 and 19,000 years old, and the team collected good-quality DNA from all specimens
In fact, you could have just stuck to the article you linked to:
the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence [...] currently stands at about half a million years
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That's for mtDNA in the bone of birds stored at 13.1 degrees Celsius. Not for genomic DNA in the blood of mammals preserved in ice.
There are big profits awaiting if you manage to clone one of them. And a lot of patents to fill all in the way toward it. Is the kind of things that could improve, extend, or save the life of only the ones that kindly pays you a lot, for something cheap to produce.
For a woolly Mammoth to survive, in large numbers, its habitat had to have very dense forestation & vegetation, even if it was a colder climate.
The interesting question is why did they suddenly get "flash frozen?" Anything less would result in carcass predation and decomposition.
The only 2 answers I can give is that a sudden volcanic eruption could have occurred to blank out the sun nearly completely or there was an asteroid impact that blanked out the sky.
Either of those conditions should be obvious from sediment records.
The episode 'Fun on a Bun' where Bender digs up a 30,000 year old Woolly Mammoth from the ice to make sausages.. Should make for some tasty sausages!!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_on_a_Bun
" Meanwhile, Bender discovers that chef Elzar is there, ready to win the sausage-making challenge using pork that has been aged over 3000 years. Bender is determined to win the event, and takes a despondent Fry with him in the Planet Express ship to look for woolly mammoths frozen in a nearby glacier within Neander Valley, believing that meat aged over 30,000 years should certainly win. Bender is successful at finding a woolly mammoth, and with Fry's help, proceeds to grind the woolly mammoth into sausages."
And you can fill in any remaining gaps with frog DNA!
When they agree with the point we want to make. Otherwise, we belittle either the guy who cites them, or his source.
"I do not think that word means what you think it means."
http://showup-tv.org.pl
Looks like mammoths are able to breathe under water as well as be alive before the Christian god created the universe. Damn you Satan, quit tricking with us!
Wouldn't that run the risk of creating some sort of mammoth frog?
I'm not sure I'd want to risk that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The article reviews "Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant" by Richard Stone, a detailed account of the 1901 Berezovka River expedition in Siberia. The starving Russians found exceptionally well-preserved mammoth meat and debated whether to eat it instead of rancid horseflesh; they decided to feed it to their dogs instead. The NSFW warning applies to where on the mammoth the well-preserved meat came from and the detailed description by the author.
Read the submission next time before marking it -1, Offtopic, moderator.
Posting the topical link again for interested readers: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/richard-fortey/down-to-the-last-flea
You got em dude. Those scientists never thought anyone would look at nature.com and foil the great fraud they were planning. Bravo!
Wooly Mammoths, running amok, skewering people with their tusks. Can we really handle another POS low budget Syfy movie?
Did you even READ that article?
Why would you ASK that? This is slashdot, clearly you are on the wrong site.
ribbit...THUMP!...ribbit...THUMP!...ribbit...
When can we have the Mammoth-Wurst...?
That article takes it to the logical conclusion and says their max viable age is something like half a million years. After 10,000 years, you'll have a lot of broken bonds, but this animal has a LOT of cells and a LOT of copies to work with. You can analyze all the fragments and work out at least one complete sequence if you have several billion copies.
The half life of all DNA is 521 years. What kind of 2-bit "scientists" are these that think they can clone an animal that died 10,000 years ago?
If you read your own reference, you will see that the researchers believe they could recover sequences as old as 1.5 million years. Granted, "sequence" is not the same as "genome", but "10,000 years" is not the same as "500,000 years" (current record). So this seems reasonable to carry out.
Remember, in this case a half life denotes whole vs. broken sequences. You don't need unbroken DNA to sequence it. Remember, one of the first things they will do with the fragmented DNA is create a library, so they will have a renewable supply of every recoverable fragment.
Maybe in this case we can use an elephant? The last thing I want is an elephant sized creature that can grab things at a distance with its tongue at blindingly fast speed. Not to mention could you imagine how high/far it could jump? It would be terrifying.
Central Ohio Home Theater Installation - The Theater People
So we'll be cloning a Darwin award grand champion? The Earth is covered in water; what will stop the mammoth from repeating its mistake?
The first one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
Semyon Grigoryev is director at the NEFU Museum of Mammoths, not a molecular biologist. The DNA was recovered by a Japanese colleague. So yeah, it's possible he knows more. I think I know more, but I'm on the record as predicting the premature senescence of Dolly the sheep to NBC News the days of the announcement that it had been cloned.
FWIW: This particular discovery is a repeat of one in 2012, and an earlier one in 2011, so the guy is pretty good at finding mammoth corpses. This repeats every several years:
2012: http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Semyon-Grigoryev/1842435513
2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111207223335/http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth-cloned-111205.html
This isn't to detract from Semyon Grigoryev (although I wish he had his credentials published online somewhere Google could find them), since it's pretty obvious that when he goes out to find mammoths or mammoth parts, he finds them.
and now they're just cloning 2300 pound mosquitoes with ten-foot tusks. terrific. first solid food for our Minnesota mosquitoes.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The blood is believed to be an ancestor of Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
It's already on an island, the problem is that at those climates the sea freezes.
So 10K years -- enough material and it should certainly be possible.
Not exactly. The article is about being able to retrieve any pieces of DNA, not fully intact DNA . To clone something, you will need it all, fully intact. After 521 years, half the bonds will be broken. By 10,000 years, only 0.000167% of the bonds would still be intact. So good luck trying to piece together fragments of DNA the right way into a complete sequence. Not to mention needing a host to bring it to term without it being rejected as an invading organism.
After 10,000 years only 0.000167% of the bonds would still be intact. What are the odds of correctly piecing together what's left of that into a complete sequence, and then getting that all the way to a living clone? I'm betting the odds are pretty close to zero. Any takers?
No, you need enough parts of enough strands to be able to piece 'em together. And for help along the way, you can use asian elephants to help out (which seems to be their nearest uncle).
That's ridiculous. It's only about 4500 yrs old. Just after the worldwide flood. Evolution nonsense is always making things out to be older than they really are. You can look up Kent Hovind on youtube to find good info on how evolution is a fraud. He shows how science really does show the earth to be young. About 6 thousand yrs old.
What could possibly go wrong? MuahHhahahaHaaha! BuWhahaHhaHahaHaHaHaha!!
Red meat? Still blood in tact? I'll take it medium rare no steak sauce.
Or.. maybe we'll have a new Russian based fast food chain in a few years?
Just for scale: Routine genome sequencing typically gets you reads that average a few hundred bases long, and then you piece all of those together in an annoyingly CPU- and memory-intensive process. We might also be able to use elephant DNA as a scaffold, which makes things simpler.
This is a great step towards satisfying the undying dream of a free-roaming, snow-loving, extinct animal: that its species may one day be resurrected and placed in a zoo during a period of ever-increasing global temperatures.
Sorry.
Why is American beer like making love in a canoe?
Because it's fucking close to water.
If your taste buds live where you sit, then your choice of beer deserves the derision heaped upon it. With so many good craft beers out there now, why would someone choose to drink Spiller Low Life pee? Just have a glass of water--it tastes the same.