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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
"I do not think that word means what you think it means."
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.
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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.
Well, "obvious" is a little strong but yes, these conditions should at least be detectable. There is ongoing research into the climate and ecological conditions around this time. The mainland Wooly Mammoths became extinct around 10000 BP, along with lots of other megafauna (large animals), all of which are grouped together in the "Quaternary Extinction Event" - the causes of which are currently being debated.
The Younger Dryas cold spell did occur shortly before the mammoths disappeared (~12800 BP). This is hypothesized to have been caused by a bolide impact or volcanism, but there is no consensus on this. This is also shortly after the Clovis people (precursors to the Native Americans) appeared in North America, and around the time that agriculture was developed in the near east.
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.
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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.