{"id":1977,"date":"2017-04-03T08:23:36","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T08:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/?p=1977"},"modified":"2017-04-01T01:29:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-01T01:29:00","slug":"woolly-mammoth-hemoglobin-brought-to-life-from-the-archives-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/2017\/04\/woolly-mammoth-hemoglobin-brought-to-life-from-the-archives-2010.html","title":{"rendered":"Woolly mammoth hemoglobin brought to life: From the archives (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Combarelles-mammouth\"<\/a>

{credit}Cave painting: Mammouth grav\u00e9 de la grotte des Combarelles (Dordogne, France){\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

As part of the ongoing celebration of the last 25 years of Nature Genetics<\/em>, the editors are each choosing a few papers from our archives that we want to highlight. My first pick a paper from Kevin Campbell, Alan Cooper and colleagues on their structure-function analysis of woolly mammoth hemoglobin<\/a>, published in May 2010.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve picked this one to highlight because, well, who doesn\u2019t love woolly mammoths?<\/p>\n

The authors compared the gene sequences of the adult-expressed \u03b1- and \u03b2-like globin genes from extant elephant species (African and Asian elephants) and from a 43,000 year-old Siberian mammoth specimen reported first in Science<\/em><\/a>. They found that the mammoth \u03b2-like genes (designated HBB\/HBD by the authors) had 3 amino acid-altering substitutions compared to the extant species.<\/p>\n

To test the effects of these protein-coding differences, the authors then \u201cresurrected\u201d the mammoth hemoglobin protein by expressing the mammoth sequence in E. coli<\/em> and testing its O2 <\/sub>affinity at different ambient temperatures. They found that the O2<\/sub> affinity of the recreated mammoth hemoglobin is less affected by temperature than that of modern-day elephants. The detailed structure-function analysis reported by Campbell et al.<\/em> offered us a rare glimpse into\u00a0the evolutionary process that shaped an extinct organism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the ongoing celebration of the last 25 years of Nature Genetics, the editors are each choosing a few papers from our archives that we want to highlight. My first pick a paper from Kevin Campbell, Alan Cooper and colleagues on their structure-function analysis of woolly mammoth hemoglobin, published in May 2010.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43003,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[255,508755],"tags":[508761,508763,69],"class_list":["post-1977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution-2","category-nature-genetics-anniversary","tag-ancient-dna","tag-comparative-sequence-analysis","tag-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43003"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/freeassociation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}