The woolly mammoth has been extinct for some time, and a 3D reconstruction of the genome might be able to revive it

What will you learn if I’m lucky enough to learn something new?” Robert Fleischer, director of the Center for Conservation Genomics, at the National Zoo and Conservation Institute, Washington,

Still, Robert Fleischer, a senior scientist for the Center for Conservation Genomics at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Institute in Washington, says that prospect is exciting.

“If I was a 12-year-old in my science class in junior high school I’d probably think this was pretty cool,” Fleischer says. I still think it is cool.

How cool is it to see a piece of skin from a woolly mammoth? An experience shared by Aiden and David Lynch

It was fun to look at an extinct creature and be able to say yes. I can see this gene was on. That gene was on. The gene wasn’t on. Isn’t it surprising? “I hear you, yes” Aiden says. It is exciting to be able to do specific things in a woolly mammoth.

“The preservation of genetic architectures from the woolly mammoth is really remarkable,” Flessa says. “But just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that it should be done. A genetically modified Asian elephant doesn’t have mammoth-like features. It wouldn’t be right to release an animal into the wild.

And Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona agrees on the scientific accomplishment and the foolishness of trying to bring back the extinct pachyderm.

“There’s an huge potential for unintended consequences,” Lynch says. “Just think about all the other invasive species that are in the world. You don’t know the effect species have on the environment until it gets there.

But Lynch isn’t a fan of trying to bring back the mammoth. He says that the consequences of that could be disastrous. And the money for such a project would be much better spent trying to save the elephants that still roam the planet today.

An associate professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research thinks it is cool.

It was a piece of skin from a mammoth. True to the name — it was indeed woolly mammoth skin,” says Olga Dudchenko, an assistant professor at the Baylor Center for Genome Architecture who worked on the research. It’s actually not as simple as it sounds because hair would be lost a lot. So this one was hairy. And that actually is an interesting indicator in and of itself that this is a sample of substantial quality. That caught our attention immediately.

“Initially we had embarrassingly bad ideas. I am a bit embarrassed to admit it, said Aiden to NPR. “We said, ‘Oh, you know, that looks like a good-looking piece of mammoth on eBay. Let’s try that.’ It’s kind of a little cringe, right, to tell you that. Ebay is a bad place to get your mammoth samples.”

Revealing DNA in a glass-like state: The discovery of a mammoth jerky chromosome

“In so doing, you would be able to see exactly how that chromosome was shaped in a living cell, and you’d be able to both get a deeper understanding of the genomes of ancient and extinct species and how those genomes worked – which genes were on and off in particular tissues,” Aiden says.

But there’s only so much scientists could learn from snippets of DNA. A group of people launched an international effort to recreate a three-dimensional structure of the genome of an extinct creature.

About 40 years ago, scientists discovered that scraps of DNA could survive in specimens from the distant past, including millennia-old Egyptian mummies. It has become evident that many ancient remains contain the remains of the human body.

A professor and director of the center for genome architecture at a Texas college says it is exciting. It is going to be very valuable, we think.

The biology of a creature that has long sparked fascination should be looked at in new light by the advance. The researchers and others said it could aid efforts to breed a living version of the animal.

The accomplishment, described Thursday in the journal Cell, marks what is believed to be the first time scientists have been able to produce a multidimensional version of the genome of a complex extinct species.

The researchers proposed that mammoth chromosomes had been preserved in a glass-like state through a dehydration process similar to that used to produce beef jerky. That technique results in tissue in which DNA molecules are densely packed and immobile.

The frozen beef Jerky which was subjected to extreme testing like being shot and run over with a car was found to be intact.

“In absolutely no way would one think that [ancient] DNA stays in its shape,” says Víctor Moreno Mayar, a specialist in ancient populations genomics at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study. Seeing that it can “is really cool”, he says.

The findings suggest that the potential for recovering ancient DNA extends beyond what was previously thought possible, as long as the conditions are ideal, Moreno Mayar says.