DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Even after all the success in cloning, the entire discussion of resurrecting a mammoth was purely hypothetical a few years ago; no DNA or genes existed for scientists to use for cloning. Recent discoveries, however, have changed the conversations from ones of theory to ones of reality.

           

In early 2008 it was announced that a six-month-old baby mammoth named “Lyuba was found last May eroding out of a riverbank in Russia’s Yamal Peninsula by Yuri Khudi, a Nenets reindeer herder” (Powell, 2008). Because of the dangerous omens that surround mammoths in his culture, Khudi went to his friend for advice and eventually the director of a local museum flew Khudi and his friend back to retrieve the baby mammoth. The carcass had been taken back into the town by Khudi’s cousin, but Khudi was able to reclaim it and ship it back to the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard. One of the first scientists to view Lyuba was Dr. Alexei Tikhonov, the director of the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum, and his friend Dr. Daniel Fisher, the director of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology. Dr. Fisher reported that when he saw her “my first thought was, Oh my goodness, she’s perfect—even her eyelashes are there! It looked like she’d just drifted off to sleep. Suddenly, what I’d been struggling to visualize for so long was lying right there for me to touch” (Mueller, 2009). Lyuba, who was named after Khudi’s wife, is the most complete mammoth carcass every found; she weighs about 110 points, and is the size of a large dog (Powell, 2008). Early analysis found that she had died about 40,000 years ago and her skeleton, teeth, soft tissues, and internal organs were completely undamaged (Mueller, 2009). After three days of intense investigation of Lyuba and her carcass, Dr. Fisher and his team realized that she had most likely slipped in the river bank and suffocated on the mud. Because of the circumstances of her death, “she had literally been pickled after she died, which protected her from rot once her body was exposed again, thousands or years later” (Mueller, 2009).

 

Baby Lyuba

Dr. Fisher and his team investigating Lyuba's intestine

 Photo of Lyuba on display; courtesy of BBC

Later in 2008 healthy mice were successfully cloned from dead brain cells of mice frozen sixteen years ago. Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan took “the nucleus of a mouse cell- in this case taken from thawed tissue- [and] injected into a mouse egg with its nucleus removed” (Nowak, 2008). None of the frozen tissue had any pretreatment and the experiment proved that the cells from dead animals can be successfully stored in a regular freezer. This success meant that extinct animals preserved in ice, including mammoths, could be cloned from their frozen genes.

 

Then, in late 2008 “a scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University reports…that it has recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair” (Wade, 2008). With the advancements in technology for mapping a genome, Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller have decoded over 70% of the mammoth genome (National Geographic Interactive). This is the “first time that so much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved” and the teams have already discovered that it differs from an elephant genome at 400,000 sites (Wong, 2009). Unfortunately, Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller have also discovered that the success of cloning frozen mice did not apply to mammoths. Mice are small and freeze quickly while a mammoth carcass take days to freeze, allowing some DNA degradation to occur (Wong, 2009). As a result, the team was not able to map out the entire genome of the mammoth, but their discoveries have shown that Asian and African elephants are close ancestors to the mammoth and an elephant egg could be made to resemble a mammoth (Wade, 2008).

 

Brief Interview with Dr. Schuster           


On October 18, 2011, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk from South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation announced that he successfully cloned eight endangered coyotes and hinted at possibly working on cloning a mammoth (Woo, 2011). Initially, this was generally considered to be an unrealistic goal, but in March 2012 Dr. Hwang Woo-suk and Dr. Vasily Vasiliev from Russia’s North-Easter Federal University of the Sakha Republic signed a deal to recreate a woolly mammoth (Neslon, 2012). The first goal of the team is to find well-preserved tissues with undamaged genes and use nuclear transfer to clone a mammoth. The most difficult part of the project will obviously to be to restore mammoth cells, but Dr. Woo-suk is confident that his institute will be able to do it since he has cloned a cow, a cat, dogs, a pig, and a wolf there (Allen, 2012). Unfortunately, using ancient DNA from an extinct species is not as easy when Dr. Woo-suk created Snuppy, the first cloned dog in 2005. Despite the possible difficulties, the team hopes to complete the restoration of mammoth cells by the end of the year and the project is estimated to cost $10 million (Allen, 2012).

 

While Lyuba remains to be the most well-preserved mammoth carcass, another discovery announced on April 4, 2012 has the scientific community excited. It was reported that a BBC/Discovery Channel funded expedition discovered a juvenile mammoth buried in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean (Viegas, 2012). The mammoth has been nicknamed Yuka and is believed to be at least 10,000 years old, if not older. The carcass shows signs of human interaction by being cut open by ancient people, but it still in relatively good shape; even the blonde-red hue of the woolly coat still remains. Dr. Daniel Fisher, who was a part of the Lyuba’s research team and the director of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology, said that Yuka “is the first relatively complete mammoth carcass—that is, a body with soft tissues preserved—to show evidence of human association” (Viegas, 2012). Early investigation has shown that Yuka was two-and-a-half years-old when it died and was probably pursued by lions, fell and broke its leg, and was butchered by humans for organs, vertebrae, ribs, associated musculature, and some meat (Viegas, 2012). The discovery of Yuka, along with Lyuba, can help scientists link observed phenotypes with genotypes to see how these two mammoths were either similar or different from each other. Both carcasses will help to make new and important discoveries in bioengineering (Viegas, 2012). 

 

Clip from the BBC/Discovery Channel Expedition that found Yuka.


Photo of Yuka; courtesy of Fox News

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.