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<< Previous   of   Next >> (click to enlarge) Associated Press ExhibitEase LLC produced this 3-D computer generated image of woolly mammoth emerging from ice block.   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Do you have a news tip? newstips@heraldnet.com | 425.339.3400   Published: Thursday, November 20, 2008 Scientists piece together mammoth DNA Bringing a woolly mammoth to life may still be out of the question, however. The Washington Post WASHINGTON -- An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species. The project provides some of the starting material that would be required to bring back to life the species of giant, hairy, cold-weather animals. That task, however, is too difficult to be accomplished soon -- and may turn out to be impossible. The research immediately offers insight into the history of elephants, however. It may illuminate the evolutionary adaptations that did -- and did not -- occur in mammoths as habitat and climate changed eons ago. It also suggests that samples of fur, including many in museum collections, may be more useful than previously recognized in studying extinct species. "One can imagine a new field of 'museomics' using the collected samples that are now stored in natural history museums," said Stephan Schuster, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University who headed the 21-person research team with a colleague, Webb Miller. "This is definitely heading in the right direction toward acquiring an extinct genome, which is really cool," said Hendrik Poinar, a molecular biologist at McMaster University, in Ontario. He has worked on other projects using "fossil DNA" but was not involved in this one. Mammoths disappeared about 10,000 years ago when they were hunted to extinction by prehistoric humans. The two lineages that gave rise to Asian elephants and woolly mammoths split off from a common ancestor about seven million years ago. The researchers, who are reporting their results Thursday in the journal Nature, used two samples of woolly mammoth hair. One was from a 20,000-year-old mammoth from Siberia. The other was from a far more ancient specimen -- 65,000 years old. Schuster and his colleagues read the sequence of genetic letters from fragments of DNA inside the shafts of mammoth hair. The DNA was left from the cells that produce the hair protein, which stack up and die as the hair grows. A chief advantage of using the hair-shaft DNA was that it was largely protected from contamination by microbes and other organisms whose DNA contaminates many ancient tissue samples. The DNA came in very short strands of no more than a few hundred bases, or letters of genetic code, strung end-to-end. In intact cells, the strands of DNA that make up chromosomes are hundreds of millions of bases long. The researchers sequenced 4.17 billion bases and determined that 3.3 billion belonged to the mammoths. The rest were from bacteria, fungi and other microbes. They made the identification by comparing the DNA sequences to that of modern elephants. The elephant and mammoth genomes are very large. Schuster and his colleagues estimate it is probably 4.7 billion bases long -- considerably longer than the 3-billion bases of the human genome. Their project captured about 80 percent of it. READER COMMENTS Be the first to comment. You must be a registered user and verify your e-mail address to post comments to blogs or articles on HeraldNet. To register, click here. To read other terms and conditions, click here. Log out

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