Pleistocene park: Rebuilding the mammoth's genetic code has fired speculation that scientists may one day revive this species and other Ice Age beasts on the lines of Jurassic Park.
Credit: Wikimedia
These creatures became extinct relatively recently, offering the possibility of recovering scraps of DNA from bodies that have been preserved in bitter sub-freezing chill.
Miller said it should one day be theoretically possible to replicate a mammoth – or rather, a mammoth-like animal – by taking the elephant's genome, stripping out the code that is specific to the elephant and replace it with code specific to the mammoth.
The new code would be fused into an elephant's egg, replacing its programming nucleus, and then be transplanted into a female elephant. But, he said, such an endeavour was fraught with technical hurdles and would need lots of money.
A mammoth undertaking
If the interest to achieve it was there, the first step would be to be compare the genome of the elephant – its publication is expected next year – with a complete error-free genome of the mammoth.
"What will be possible some day in the future is to synthetically make all the substitutions within the elephant sequence," he said.
"Doing that, you're going to need to know the sequence. The work that we did represents a large step in that direction. We need to get not only the other 50 per cent of the genome, but we need to sequence each base pair many times to make sure there are no sequencing errors."
Miller argued that the fast-track methods for gene sequencing and analysing could be of greater use in saving species today rather than reviving species of the past. The team was poring the genome of Australia's Tasmanian devil, whose numbers have been ravaged by cancerous facial tumours.
Pipe dream?
"The mammoth together with the dodo and the neanderthal are iconic examples of extinctions that have long fascinated human culture. The completion of the first draft genome is a significant accomplishment that is soon be ‘trumped’ by the completion of the neanderthal genome," commented Michael Bunce, head of the ancient DNA laboratory at Murdoch University in Western Australia.
Bunce was doubtful that the sequence would lead to the reconstruction of a living mammoth, though, and added that: "just because we know the DNA code of something does not mean we can genetically tinker with it to the extent required to recreate extinct organisms - this kind of progress is still a pipe-dream.”
Why the woolly mammoth died out is a mystery in itself. Some scenarios blame climate change that destroyed its sources of food; others say it was wiped out by human hunters (see, DNA points to climate in mammoth whodunit, Cosmos Online).
