Posted on 09/27/2007 10:18:39 PM PDT by saganite
Science Daily — Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Penn State, working with Thomas Gilbert from Copenhagen and a large international consortium, discovered that hair shafts provide an ideal source of ancient DNA -- a better source than bones and muscle for studying the genome sequences of extinct animals. Their research achievement, described in a paper to be published in the journal Science on Sept. 28, includes the sequencing of entire mitochondrial genomes from 10 individual woolly mammoths.
Schuster and Miller, working at Penn State's Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics, and Gilbert, from the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of collaborators that includes a large group of researchers and museum curators from the United States, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The research team obtained hair from 10 woolly mammoths collected from a wide swathe of northern Siberia and with dates of death spanning approximately 38,000 years -- from 50,000 years to 12,000 years ago. Before this study, only seven mitochondrial genomes from extinct animals had been published: four from ancient birds, two from mammoths and one from a mastodon.
"DNA in bones and muscle usually degrades and becomes contaminated with genetic material from other sources such as bacteria, limiting its usefulness in scientific studies," Schuster explained. Because only a tiny proportion of ancient bones and muscle are preserved in such a way that uncontaminated DNA can be recovered, research with such materials has involved laborious efforts, sometimes spanning as long as six years for a single study. In contrast, Miller said, "Once I get the data from the genome sequencer, it takes only five minutes to assemble the entire mitochondrial genome."
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Getting ever closer to seeing live Woolly Mammoths again.
I read somewhere that they would have to implant woolly mammoth DNA into a female elephant egg and what would result would be a cross. Several such implantations would result in something that resembled a woolly but would never be the real thing.
LOL! A genetic throwback fer sure.
throwout
throw....up?
Obviously these people didn't learn a thing from the 3 Jurassic Park movies.
“Obviously these people didn’t learn a thing from the 3 Jurassic Park movies.”
Can you imagine the hunting fees Jurassic park could have made?
Can you imagine the hunting fees Jurassic park could have made?
Nah. T Rex food.
Aren't elephants mammals? Geez, I've screwed the pooch if they aren't (no personal comments, please). The only mammal, to my knowledge, that propagates via eggs is the curious duckbill platypus.
But, hey, maybe someone can make a buck selling elephant eggs, right on the carny midway, next to Gork's Global Warming or Cooling (pick one) booth.
It’s OK.
You eat ‘em.
or....
They eat you.
(In a related story, Helen Thomas is going to request nose transplant surgery.)
There, fixed it. Yummmm!
Traced to this guy...
Oh, you’re going to pay in hell for that!
Umm. Biology 101.
Yes, and, like all mammals, the female produces eggs, the male produces sperm, the sperm fertilizes the egg, and the fertilized egg develops into the young, either inside the mother, or outside (platypuses and echidnas).
I LOL’d
they got whacked out of existence by guys with spears.
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