Comeback for Ice Age critter?
But if a team of Japanese, Russian and American scientists are successful, one could soon be lumbering around, shedding all over the place.
The researchers, led by Prof. Akira Iritani, professor emeritus of Kyoto University, hope to clone the animal using tissue obtained this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian laboratory. The nuclei of mammoth cells would be inserted into an elephant's egg cells from which the nuclei have been removed to create an embryo containing mammoth genes.
The embryo would then be planted in an elephant's womb.
Frozen mammoth skin and muscle tissue have been collected before from Siberia's permafrost, but most cell nuclei were irreparably damaged by ice crystals. In 2008, however, Japan's Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama figured out how to clone a mouse from cells that had been kept in a deep-freeze for 16 years.
Using Wakayama's technique, Iritani's team thinks it can extract mammoth nuclei without damaging it.
If all goes as planned, a baby mammoth could be born in five or six years.
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This sounds all too familiar....
