This week’s copy of Nature contains a paper that may far in the future help with the return of a woolly face from the past.
“Here we describe 4.17 billion bases (Gb) of sequence from several mammoth specimens, 3.3 billion (80%) of which are from the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) genome and thus comprise an extensive set of genome-wide sequence from an extinct species,” write Webb Miller of Penn State University, and his colleagues.
It’s only the genome of a woolly mammoth!
So does this mean the lumbering beasts could soon be roaming a zoo near you? In another part of this issue of Nature, as part of our Darwin 200 coverage, Henry Nicholls says ‘Let’s make a mammoth’:
It would be a huge undertaking … . Perhaps the whole idea will remain too strange, too expensive, too impractical, even too unappealing for anyone to take seriously.
But the fact that just 15 years ago cloning mammals was confidently ruled out by many as being impractical should give people pause before saying any such thing is impossible. On Darwin’s 200th birthday in 2009, reoriginating extinct animal species will still be a fantasy. By 2059, who knows what may have returned, rebooted, to walk the Earth?
More tusk-tastic coverage below the fold
“Previous studies on extinct organisms have generated only small amounts of data. Our dataset is 100 times more extensive than any other published dataset for an extinct species, demonstrating that ancient DNA studies can be brought up to the same level as modern genome projects.
– Stephan Schuster, Penn State professor and paper author (press release)
The research offers insight into the history of elephants … . It may illuminate the evolutionary adaptations that did — and did not — occur in mammoths as their habitat and the climate changed eons ago. The research also suggests that samples of fur, including many in museum collections, may be more useful than scientists thought in studying extinct species.
Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller said there was no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome, which they believe could be achieved for a further $2 million. They have already been able to calculate that the mammoth’s genes differ at some 400,000 sites on its genome from that of the African elephant.
There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million.
The next draft nuclear genome of an extinct species likely to become available is that of our closest relative, the Neanderthal, following on from publication of a complete Neanderthal mitochondrial genome sequence. For some time yet, much work in genomics will consist of fully annotating and completing genome sequences, as indeed most published sequences of extant vertebrates, let alone that of the extinct mammoth, remain drafts.
But when we look further into the future, the task will be to understand which differences at the sequence level underlie the phenotypic differences between a mammoth and an elephant, or a human and a Neanderthal, for which well-annotated genomes provide the essential basis.
– Michael Hofreiter, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a Nature News and Views article on the new research.
Image: Modern mammoth art / Birgit Hannwacker