Scientists from Japan and Russia will seek to clone a mammoth from genes to be extracted from the thighbone of a mammoth recently found in Siberia, Kyodo News reported. Their effort will be the first time scientists have attempted to clone an animal from cells taken from an extinct species.
Teams from Japan’s Kinki University and the Russian Sakha Republic’s Mammoth Museum will launch their cloning effort on the mammal widely believed to have become extinct 10,000 years ago. They will be working with well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thighbone found in August in Siberian permafrost.
Nuclei taken from the marrow cells will be planted into elephant eggs whose nuclei have been removed. Once a mammoth embryo is formed, it will be planted into the womb of an elephant. Mammoths and modern elephants are closely related species.
Efforts had been made since 1990 to secure undamaged DNA from a mammoth for a cloning effort, but without success.
Recent thawing of the soil of Sakha Republic in Russia’s far east has allowed many frozen mammoths to be unearthed. But in most such fossils the cell nuclei are damaged by natural freezing or not being kept frozen continuously even after being found in good condition, said a Russian museum official.
The current project will use a find near Batagay in northern Sakha. Scientists foresee a high likelihood of success because fresh and biologically active nuclei was found in the frozen marrow when museum scientists cut into the thighbone on Nov. 13.
Another reason for optimism is the dramatic progress made during the past few years in techniques for extracting nuclei. Some undamaged nuclei have been successfully taken from ill-preserved mammoth tissue fragments though they were not complete, said the Japanese team from Kinki University in Osaka Prefecture.
The museum notified the Japanese scientists soon after the discovery based on close working ties established through joint research begun in 1997 involving professor Akira Iritani and associate professor Hiromi Kato. The museum is located in Yakutsk, the Sakha republic’s capital.
Iritani saw photos of the marrow and reaffirmed that its condition was high enough to allow a good chance of successfully regenerating a mammoth. The Japanese team will secure elephant eggs for the planned experiment which they do not expect to be an easy task.
