Scientists want to create "Dolly the sheep, but only with tusks and trunk"
Yakutia-Petersburg-Moscow. This route was made by the baby mammoth Chroma, found in 2009 in the Sakha Republic.
At the end of the 2000s, the 50 thousand-year-old baby was placed in the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Scientists from the northern capital handed over the chroma biomaterial to colleagues at the Kurchatov Institute and the Bioengineering Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences - wool, skin and bone.
For several years, the capital's specialists made 3.5 billion particles and letters in a single sequence and recently completely decoded the mammoth genome. Scientists have proven that the woolly mammoth is the brother of a living Asian elephant. They had similar DNA.
- Now we can clone a mammoth by changing several genes in the Asian elephant. There will be a kind of Dolly the sheep, only with a trunk and tusks, - said Konstantin Skryabin, director of the Center for Bioengineering of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to Komsomolskaya Pravda.
According to him, the study of ancient DNA is one of the "hot spots" in modern science. The study of genetic information can provide answers to many questions.
- It's not just about animals. We recently discovered the skeletons of two men in the Caucasus, about 4 thousand years ago. Studies have shown that they suffered from brucellosis. It turns out that they drank milk, which means that they had developed agriculture! Here are some interesting conclusions, - said Konstantin Scriabin.
Such genetic research, the so-called "full cycle", is carried out in only three countries of the world, and now also in Russia.
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- We are creating a unique platform. Deciphering ancient DNA can tell us about how people migrated and where they came from,”said the director of the Center for Bioengineering of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Plus, we can understand the nature of the appearance of many pathologies in the body, having found out where and in which human populations gene mutations began to arise that cause various diseases, including cancer.
Konstantin Skryabin added: Russia is a unique country, occupying one sixth of the land. A lot of sensational discoveries await us.
- I think our archaeologists will make many more interesting finds. We will carefully study them and make a significant contribution to science, - the scientist summed up.
Maxim SYU