Scientists are close to resurrecting the woolly mammoth

Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth: Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for the Next-to-Leading Elephant

De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. The woolly mammoth was given the fuzzy hair and blubber that it needed to thrive in sub-zero environments by an Asian elephant’s genes.

“What I find troubling is bringing back some sort of a surrogate that is part- mammoth, part-elephant,” said Joseph Bennett, an associate professor of biology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. “Bringing that back as something that would somehow be portrayed as conservation would be a difficult sell on my part.”

And now the company says scientists have for the first time created induced pluripotent stem cells for the mammoth’s closest living relative: Asian elephants. The company plans to describe the work in a scientific paper that will be posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed, but the company says that’s in progress.

“This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project,” said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded Colossal Biosciences in Dallas.

Church said the achievement is a major step towards creating herds of giant hairy beasts roaming in the wild again. Church said the question of whether or not Neil was planning to go to Mars misses the point of his landing on the moon.

“We don’t necessarily need to bring back a perfect genome of a mammoth, because we want one that has certain things that mammoths didn’t have. “We want them to be resistant to the Herpesvirus that is killing a lot of baby elephants,” Church said.

What would he learn from the woolly mammoth program? A conversation with Karl: How to educate the elephants in the face of global warming

Karl spoke about what he would get out of this. “First of all, I think you’re going to get a bit of a freak show in a zoo somewhere. Is that herd going to go marching off to its second death in the face of global warming?

There will be only one lonely elephant, that’s why some people think it’s a bad idea. That’s not our intention,” Church said. They’re supposed to be fully socialized in large herds. Some people think it’s a bad idea because it takes money away from conservation efforts, when in fact we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

Church said the woolly mammoth program could lead to new ways to protect endangered species like Asian elephants by expanding their habitat and helping scientists study the animals.

“It opens up new possibilities for the preservation of genetic diversity, preventing extinction and doing something to sustain the species,” he said. There’s a lot of potential.

The unique biology of elephants: the formation of pluripotent embryotic stem cells for the northern white rhino and other functionally extinct species

The difficulty could have to do with the unique biology of elephants,Vincent Lynch, a developmental biologist at the Universty at Buffalo in New York who was not involved in the Colossal study said. Elephants have low rates of cancer because they are so large. Since cancer can be caused by genetic mutations that accumulate as cells divide, you’d expect that animals with 100 times more cells than humans would have a much higher risk of cancer.

The cells that Colossal created are called iPSCs, and they behave like the stem cells found in an embryo. pluripotency is when embryotic stem cells are able to give rise to all kinds of cell types in organisms. Most cells, however, lose this ability as the organism develops. Human skin, for instance, can’t spontaneously turn into muscle or cells that line the inside of the intestine.

In 2006, the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka showed it was possible to take mature cells and turn them back into a pluripotent state. After Yamanaka discovered that he could make iPSCs for a lot of different species, scientists followed up with the creation of iPSCs for the northern white rhino, which is a functionally extinct subspecies with two females remaining in the wild.