Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
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What are woolly mice and why are they significant?
And how do they go about doing that?
So they started by comparing genomes from samples of ancient DNA recovered from mammoth remains with genomes from living African and Asian elephants, the mammoths' closest living relatives.
We ask, where are all of the mammoths the same as each other, but different from an elephant? So this is narrowing down the focus on the genes that make mammoths mammoths instead of elephants.
That's Beth Shapiro, the chief science officer at Colossal.
So in practice, I imagine they're like hunting for genes responsible for like iconic, you know, mammoth traits like their distinctive coat.
Yeah.
And maybe their fat?
Exactly. And they narrowed down that list of candidate genes to 10 genes for the coat and the fat. Okay. But they wanted to make sure that the genes they had identified were really responsible for the traits that they wanted. They couldn't just, you know, try to engineer Asian elephants with genes they thought might control those traits because it would be unethical given the fact that Asian elephants are endangered.
Here's a difference in a letter in a long string of A's and C's and G's and T's. A genome of a mammoth that we've gotten out of a bone that was preserved in the permafrost in Siberia. It's hard to test that in an elephant because an elephant is pregnant for 22 months and then it takes another decade to 14 years for that elephant to be able to have a baby. Mm-hmm.
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