The first laboratory in Russia to study the DNA of extinct animals began work in Yakutsk. The director of the Mammoth Museum, Semyon Grigoriev, told about this, quoted by the Ogonyok magazine.
The main task of the laboratory is to find living cells for subsequent cloning. First of all, researchers expect to revive mammoths. Northeastern Federal University, South Korean Foundation for Biotechnological Research Sooam and Beijing Institute of Genomics have joined forces to implement the project.
To obtain a cell, it is important for specialists not only to find the remains of animals that are well preserved in permafrost conditions, but also to develop a technique that will allow them to competently defrost them.
Photo: Kirill Kallinikov / RIA Novosti
As the director of the Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexei Tikhonov noted, sometimes it is possible to find separate whole nuclei of a cell in tissue samples, sometimes even the contours of the cells themselves are visible, but when they thaw, everything disappears.
“It is now believed that wool is the best starting material for isolating the DNA of fossil animals,” Tikhonov notes. - But again, just extracted from the permafrost. We must have time to do everything before the cuticular layer begins to collapse, since the invasion of modern microorganisms will immediately begin on the hair."
Earlier in March 2015, American geneticists reported that they were able to insert 14 mammoth genes into an elephant's DNA. The scientists used the CRISPR genome editing tool. At the time of the announcement, the results of the experiment were not presented in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
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