An event involving the discovery of a considerably intact specimen after this animal species had been extinct for thousands of years made the newspaper headlines in Japan in 2011.
During that year, a woolly baby mammoth was found in the Siberian permafrost. The animal was believed to be 28,000 years old.
Researchers at Japan’s Kindai University were keen to learn whether the animal’s biological elements were still viable even one millennium later.
They discovered that the unearthed woolly mammoth’s DNA was largely complete. This fact indicated that the scientists were well on their way to bringing the massive prehistoric creature back to life.
They found it complex to determine whether the mammoth DNA was still operational. The researchers began the process by extracting muscle tissue and bone marrow from the woolly baby mammoth’s leg.
Next, they examined the specimen for undamaged nucleus-like structures’ presence that they then found and removed. After harvesting nuclei from the mammoth cells, the scientists combined the mouse oocytes with these nuclei cells and added mouse proteins.
The mouse oocytes are cells existing in the ovaries and can generate an egg cell after genetic division.
Then, the researchers discovered that some of the mammoth cells were wholly capable of nuclear reconstitution, which exhibited that active nuclei might be found in the 28,000-year-old woolly baby mammoth’s bones.
The specimen’s cells started to display biological process proofs during the remarkable scientific experiment. Kei Miyamoto is a research author at Kindai University’s Department of Genetic Engineering.
He pointed out that the development involving the cells from a woolly baby mammoth that perished more than 28,000 years ago exhibited that cell activity may still exist and its components can be replicated even after thousands of years have passed.
Five of the cells even showed quite intriguing and unexpected results. Among these outcomes are signs of activity that are usually witnessed just prior to cell division.
Miyamoto conceded that they are quite distant from reconstructing a woolly mammoth. Nonetheless, plenty of scientists attempting to perform this procedure via genome editing are optimistic that triumph is on the horizon.
Recent attempts to reconstruct a specie that utilize the controversial CRISPR gene editing method are possibly the most promising.
A team of Japanese scientists have been able to revive long-extinct woolly mammoths cells. They have found a way to insert the mammoth genes into the genome of an elephant embryo and bring back the element that was responsible for its furry coat, shaggy hair, and subcutaneous fat.
The process of cloning is still new. However, this breakthrough will pave the way for a variety of new animals that are also endangered, such as pandas and tigers.
Scientists in Japan have created cells with the same DNA as a woolly mammoth using a technique called “de-extinction”. They hope that one day, these cells can be used to create an animal that closely resembles the majestic creature of the past.
The group of scientists from Tokyo University and Yokohama City University have been experimenting with combinations of genes from modern elephants and other animals for 18 years in order to recreate elements of the extinct species. The scientists extracted nuclei from mammoths that died between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago and placed them into donor elephant eggs. They would then place those eggs into female elephants whose ovaries had been removed for reproduction-related reasons. A total of 68 cloned embryos were produced, but only seven survived long enough to divide into blastocysts until they could no longer grow any further naturally.
The researchers found only one embryo that contained insertions at two positions on the mammoth genome where they had inserted genetic
A team of geneticists led by Dr. Shoukou Ohta at Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine has taken cells from a 10,000-year-old extinct animal and put them into an elephant where it is still alive today.
