This is certainly interesting. However, even if Dr. Wakayama's cloning technique proves fruitful for frozen mammoth specimens, I don't think anyone believes that it's possible to get an entire, un-damaged Mammoth genome out of any given sample. Or even necessarily from a combination of all known samples. I suspect that this (or something like this) will actually work, but that it will be necessary to "blend" the genome with some related organism -- probably elephants -- to make up for the missing pieces. The best-case scenario is probably something on the order of an 85/15 mammoth/elephant hybrid. That's ignoring the possibility that some of what we
think is mammoth genome is not actually bacterial contamination.
Other random, disorganized thoughts:
- How close are we to having a fully functional copy of a mammoth Y chromosome? This is a crucial "bottleneck" for obtaining a breeding pair of mammoths.
- Elephants have 56 chromosomes, mammoths have 58. Theoretically, it might be possible to mate them and produce a (probably) infertile melemoth. For that matter, you might be able to at least temporarily solve the problem above by borrowing a Y chromosome from an elephant.
- The divergence between elephant and mammoth DNA seems to be half that between humans and chimpanzees. To put that in perspective, the divergence between different (early and late) mammoth samples seems to be about 1/8th of the divergence between humans and chimpanzees.
- Today I learned that you can buy DNA synthesizers for less than $1000 on eBay. Seriously. They're quite limited in the length of sequence you can produce (not even remotely close to synthesizing an entire chromosome), but still.
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