Russian scientists to attempt clone of woolly mammoth

[joseephuss]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16068581

Russian scientists to attempt clone of woolly mammoth

Scientists from Russia and Japan are undertaking a Jurassic Park-style experiment in an effort to bring the woolly mammoth out of extinction.

The scientists claim that a thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells, which could form the starting point of the experiment.

The team claim that the cloning could be complete within the next five years.

But others have cast doubt on whether such a thing is possible.
Mother cow?

The team, from the Siberian mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University, said that they planned to extract a nucleus from the animal's bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant.

Similar procedures have been done before with mixed results.

[SaltwaterServr]

Ha! Nice news story, no real substance. Someone's burning a lot of embryology research dollars on a very long shot at a hybrid species. In all candor, they'd be better off taking the entire research grant and betting that the fifth horse in the fifth race on May the 5th in 2012 at the Aqueduct will come in fifth, fifty-five times in it's next 55 races.

Even if they managed to pull it off, they still only have an elephant/mammoth hybrid of an undetermined percentage mixture of genes.

Say they get it right in the first 5000 trials, and the animal is born. You'd then have to repeat the process, putting the extinct animal's deoxyribo back into another viable reproductive cell in the surrogate animal.

Run another 5000 trials and hope you get it right.

After that, you've potentially got a mostly mammoth hybrid.

One itty bitty problem. You need 5000 x2 viable elephant eggs to put the initial and subsequent hybrid cells into.

10,000 baby elephants won't be born just to get a single mostly mammoth hybrid.

How you think that will fly with the conservation groups around the world? Of course some zoo is going to donate a female for the amount of publicity it would generate as well as the gate receipts from people wanting to see the "Modern Mother of the Next Woolly Mammoth".

Let's not forget though that an elephant's gestation time is the longest of any animal on the face of the Earth, if the hybrid egg was carried full term. So you're blowing 22 months hoping to see if you can get a birth.

Yeah, you can run more than one trial at a time at different zoos around the world if you had the cash money to run that many trials and field teams to monitor the surrogate 24/7.

Is it worth attempting? Sure! Why not? Ain't my tax dollar.

That said, anyone interested in it should take a gander at the Stanford Law Review's paper on Cloning the Woolly Mammoth. I imagine you have to be able to find it online somewhere, it was required reading when I took my first genetics class.

[SaltwaterServr]

Okay, I screwed up a bit in my first reply. Slight blame goes to Shiner Bock.

In order to improve the hybrid's percentage genetic representation beyond the approximate 50/50 you'd start off with, you'd have to have a female hybrid adult to put the extinct DNA into. The way I had it the first time, you'd be diluting the mammoth hybrid's genes rather than concentrating them.

That brings up another, even worse, set of time constraint issues along with the gender issue.

You have to have a viable female hybrid to implant the extinct DNA into. in a perfect world, you can extract a somantic cell and rebuild it as a possible acceptor. This ain't a perfect world and you're most likely going to need an adult mammoth, i.e. a reproducing female. So after a decade and a half, I think, you'd have an adult female mammoth hybrid ready to produce eggs. You might, might, might be able to induce egg production earlier and you might e able to induce estrerous on a very rapid cycle to get as many eggs as possible.

Of course once you get the eggs and one gets fertilized you implant it into a surrogate mother so you could keep producing more eggs should the first experimental trial fail.

So figure at least 10 years between each successive hybrid generation. Even without considering dominant/recessive traits between the two species you're looking at what, 48 (10 years age+2 years gestation) years before you hit a 90%+ mammoth hybrid?

How much will the technology evolve in just 10 years while your waiting for that first (if you ever get it) 50/50 mammoth hybrid to mature? Think how many millions were spent on the Human Genome Project just trying to decode the first human genetic code? Now you can do a person's complete DNA within 99% accuracy for under 100K. Heck, it might be under 10K at this point.

Point being, great story guys, have fun with that. Let someone qualified 15 years from now have a real crack at it.

Post-script; worth noting not all animals are equal when it comes to cloning. Mice=easy. Horses=PITA

[BrAinPaiNt]

Saltwater...quit being a hater.

When I am wearing a fancy new pair of woolly mammoth underwear I am going to post a pic of them so I can rub it in your face.

[Sam I Am]

They've already cloned a Wooly Bully.

[joseephuss]

Originally Posted by BrAinPaiNt

Saltwater...quit being a hater.

When I am wearing a fancy new pair of woolly mammoth underwear I am going to post a pic of them so I can rub it in your face.

What are you rubbing in his face? The pic or the underwear?

[BrAinPaiNt]

Originally Posted by joseephuss

What are you rubbing in his face? The pic or the underwear?

The pic...he is not worthy of feeling my fine, fabulous, foxy, fancy, frivolous and frilly woolly mammoth underwear.

[Sam I Am]

Originally Posted by BrAinPaiNt

The pic...he is not worthy of feeling my fine, fabulous, foxy, fancy, frivolous and frilly woolly mammoth underwear.

...I thought that last word was going to consist of three letters.

[BadWolf]

Originally Posted by SaltwaterServr

Ha! Nice news story, no real substance. Someone's burning a lot of embryology research dollars on a very long shot at a hybrid species. In all candor, they'd be better off taking the entire research grant and betting that the fifth horse in the fifth race on May the 5th in 2012 at the Aqueduct will come in fifth, fifty-five times in it's next 55 races.

Even if they managed to pull it off, they still only have an elephant/mammoth hybrid of an undetermined percentage mixture of genes.

Say they get it right in the first 5000 trials, and the animal is born. You'd then have to repeat the process, putting the extinct animal's deoxyribo back into another viable reproductive cell in the surrogate animal.

Run another 5000 trials and hope you get it right.

After that, you've potentially got a mostly mammoth hybrid.

[View Full Quote]One itty bitty problem. You need 5000 x2 viable elephant eggs to put the initial and subsequent hybrid cells into.

10,000 baby elephants won't be born just to get a single mostly mammoth hybrid.

How you think that will fly with the conservation groups around the world? Of course some zoo is going to donate a female for the amount of publicity it would generate as well as the gate receipts from people wanting to see the "Modern Mother of the Next Woolly Mammoth".

Let's not forget though that an elephant's gestation time is the longest of any animal on the face of the Earth, if the hybrid egg was carried full term. So you're blowing 22 months hoping to see if you can get a birth.

Yeah, you can run more than one trial at a time at different zoos around the world if you had the cash money to run that many trials and field teams to monitor the surrogate 24/7.

Is it worth attempting? Sure! Why not? Ain't my tax dollar.

That said, anyone interested in it should take a gander at the Stanford Law Review's paper on Cloning the Woolly Mammoth. I imagine you have to be able to find it online somewhere, it was required reading when I took my first genetics class.

Since they are inserting a bone marrow nucleus into the egg wouldn't it be all mammoth... unless mammoths kept their sperm in their thigh. But its the Russians, the nucleus will explode before it gets to the egg.

[arglebargle]

I love Mad Science!

Hang time on a clonish mammoth attempt is larger than I'd estimated though. Still, the chance to make your bones as the first group to bring back a representative of an extinct species is an easy sell on the science circuit, I am sure.

Gotta be something well known or flashy. Some mousey thing is not going to cut it. Tasmanian Tiger? The Dodo? An Axebeak? Maybe a Sabretooth? Apparantly there were pony sized Elephants from Crete until relatively recently in human history.

With the permafrost unfreezing in unprecedented amounts recently, they are getting some really good samples of 'quick frozen' mammoths to work with.

I understand they taste like ... pachyderm.

[SaltwaterServr]

Originally Posted by BrAinPaiNt

When I am wearing a fancy new pair of woolly mammoth underwear I am going to post a pic of them so I can rub it in your face.

THere is so much wrong with that...

Originally Posted by BadWolf

Since they are inserting a bone marrow nucleus into the egg wouldn't it be all mammoth... unless mammoths kept their sperm in their thigh. But its the Russians, the nucleus will explode before it gets to the egg.

No, not at all.

50/50 the first generation.

12 years

75/25 Mammoth in the second generation.

12 years

87.5/12.5 Third Generation

12 years

93.75/6.25 Fourth Generation

12 years

97/3% Fifth Generation

So 60 years until you get a better than 95% Mammoth offspring, provided that some parts of the elephant DNA aren't dominant and can be overwritten by the mammoth DNA.

Put this in perspective. If you started the experiment the day that World War 2 ended, you'd be getting your 97% Mammoth born about the same time YouTube was invented.

[BadWolf]

Originally Posted by SaltwaterServr

THere is so much wrong with that...



No, not at all.

50/50 the first generation.

12 years

75/25 Mammoth in the second generation.

12 years

87.5/12.5 Third Generation

12 years

93.75/6.25 Fourth Generation

12 years

97/3% Fifth Generation

So 60 years until you get a better than 95% Mammoth offspring, provided that some parts of the elephant DNA aren't dominant and can be overwritten by the mammoth DNA.

Put this in perspective. If you started the experiment the day that World War 2 ended, you'd be getting your 97% Mammoth born about the same time YouTube was invented.

I would assume they are going to do it using the same technique they used to make Dolly.

From wikipedia: She was created using the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the cell nucleus from an adult cell is transferred into an unfertilised oocyte (developing egg cell) that has had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell is then stimulated to divide by an electric shock, and when it develops into a blastocyst it is implanted in a surrogate mother.

In which case its all mammoth.

[bbgun]

I'm not cleaning up after that thing.

[Ren]

Meh, wake me when you make a dinosaur, mammoths are kinda boring just elephants with hair

[vta]

Originally Posted by bbgun

I'm not cleaning up after that thing.