Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells (sciencemag.org)

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700,000-year-old horse in Canada's Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia...extinct horses, rhinos, and deer,
This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?

Comments

Of course!

[drunken_boxer777]

Why would we pass up a chance to learn? Scientists from all branches of science learn by tinkering, and this would be another form, even if we only did it to validate our understanding (once sufficiently advanced) of how DNA sequences yield a very specific body pattern and size and set of behaviors.

Besides, most people forget that the environment the dinosaurs lived in was very different from ours, both in temperature/climate and air composition, making it a much more difficult problem than "can we clone them?". For example, prehistoric insects were very large, larger than what the current oxygen levels in our atmosphere could support since they don't have lungs and breathe basically via diffusion. So, for specific values of "prehistoric" the difficulties involve artificial environments.

Keep dreaming

[minkwe]

I don't know how the reporter thinks this discovery could ever lead to cloning of such an organism. A typical eukaryote has 20,000 to 100,000 proteins in its proteome. Even viruses could have hundreds of proteins. To clone an organism, you will need to have a full copy of its DNA (or RNA in the case of RNA viruses). That means prestine samples of all proteins from the proteome. Even having that is not enough, since going from proteins to DNA is not straightforward -- since proteins are often modified after translation. Even then, you also need non-protein encoding DNA which is just as important for the survival of the organism.

I would say it is a pipe dream to start thinking of cloning, based on finding a fragment of a pre-historic protein. Rather than speculate about cloning, there are a lot of other very useful questions this discovery can answer, such as how that protein has evolved with respect similar proteins modern variants of the same species. We could perhaps then understand what micro-evolutionary pressures could have influenced (or not influenced) the evolution of a species such as an ostrich which has survived all these years.