Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News
Proteins from woolly mammoth cells frozen for 28,000 years in the Siberian tundra may still have some biological activity, claim researchers attempting to clone the extinct behemoths.
Japanese scientists first extracted nuclei, the DNA-containing compartments of cells, from the muscles of a juvenile woolly mammoth called Yuka, discovered in 2010 in northeast Russia. The team then transplanted those nuclei into mouse eggs and watched what happened next.
The mammoth cells did not come back to life to create a cloned mammoth, as researchers had hoped. But the cells did show some early signs that biological activity might be preserved for millennia, the researchers report in a paper published March 11 in Scientific Reports. Science News talked to Lawrence Smith to see if those claims really hold up. Smith, a geneticist and reproductive biologist at the University of Montreal Faculty of Veterinary Medicine who was not involved in the m study, is an expert in cloning.
What exactly did the Japanese researchers find?
The study is part of an effort to clone a mammoth, Smith says. The scientists did similar work in 2015, but the new study presents evidence that the nuclei in the frozen animal’s cells still contained some important proteins, including some that spool DNA and others that form a scaffold that helps the nucleus keep its shape. To determine if those proteins could still do their jobs, Akira Iritani of Kindai University in Wakayama, Japan, and colleagues extracted 88 nuclei from muscle cells and transferred some to mouse oocytes, or eggs.
Within the mouse eggs, the mammoth nuclei began showing signs of preparing to make new cells — assembling structures called spindles that help divvy up DNA in dividing cells, compacting the DNA and forming “blebs,” or bubblelike structures in the membrane surrounding the DNA.
That’s evidence that the nuclei were still capable of some biological activity, even after 28,000 years, the researchers say.
But after those initial stirrings, the activity stopped. None of the mouse-mammoth hybrid cells divided to…
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