f13.net

Okay not really, but the quest to un-extinct a species via cloning is officially underway. I for one really hope this shit works.

Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110117/wl_asia_afp/japansciencemammoth_20110117104445)

I hope they manage to pull this off, and I am sure the methods they will have to develop in order to even attempt this will prove useful in many other applications.

I will register my suspicion that they will fail though, for a host of possible reasons. I mainly wonder about the integrity and quality of the DNA, it is unlikely to be in tip-top quality after so many years.

It would be beyond awesome if they succeeded.

What the article fails to mention is that the resulting mammoth will have very large eyes and shout everything.

I'm with Yeg on this one. It's Japan. It will end up getting repeatedly raped by japanese businessmen. Poor mammoth.

Fixed that for you.

Aren't they using the DNA from that Mammoth they excavated almost 100% intact from the Siberian permafrost a few years ago? If I recall, the tissues were all in pretty much "just after dead" state on that thing when they pulled it out.

That's where you splice in the frog DNA.

I think so, but 34,000 years is still a substantial timeframe, and while bacterial DNA has been resurrected after significantly longer periods (in the order of millions of years old, from ice cores), eukaryotic DNA has less tolerance for errors. It is hard to believe that such long periods where the DNA will have undergone physical and chemical stress will have left it unscarred. Cloning from living tissues is still a somewhat hit-and-miss endeavour, let alone using DNA which has had thousands of years to degrade. That said, I expect they will have to develop methods to patch, repair and splice the DNA which will have widespread uses in synthetic biology, so this is far from a useless endeavour.

This will end well. I for one welcome our new ancient pachyderm overlords.

Now I understand why these people are constantly getting attacked by large monsters. You didn't think Godzilla just came outta the ocean now did you?

So you're saying they might accidentally create Mammothra?

Its not so much degradation, its the fact that cells have this annoying habit of  bursting when you freeze them, because the water in them expands. So when you defrost them you have a nice unusuable lump of proteins.

That and the technique they used on Dolly the sheep (electric shock to stimulate the egg to start dividing) actually damages the DNA anyway. That's why Dolly came after 1000s of failures. And she aged too fast.

Cell structure and DNA are two very different things.

Holy shit. Jesus really can come back!

Wouldn't it be funny if we extracted DNA from the shroud of Turin and it turns out to be one of the two thieves? Some schmuck with a moniker like Jedediah the Unclean. or something.

Blah blah epigenome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) blah maternal effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_effect) blah share a bloodstream blah blah.

At this point it'd be funny if it were actually 2k years old instead of ~800 :awesome_for_real: