Just Exactly Like We Planned?
Irradiated by LabRat
By now most of you who pay attention to such things have probably already heard of the planned collaboration to resurrect the mammoth by injecting an elephant egg nucleus with mammoth DNA and incubating the result in a female Indian elephant.
The linked article mentions the background of many of the involved scientists with cloning, and indeed something like that has been done before in the Audubon exercise of having a domestic cat incubate black-footed cat embryos and successfully birth and raise the kits.
What I’m really wondering about is the impact genomic imprinting is going to have on this experiment. Imprinting is not well understood, but it’s something mammals do and other groups of animals don’t, and it seems to be most heavily involved in embryonic development. It’s why there aren’t any parthenogenetic species of mammal; in order to develop normally, mammals need input from both parents on various developmental epigenetic tags. This wasn’t a problem with the black-footed cats because that was in vitro fertilization with an already-made embryo using frozen sperm, and presumably researchers who clone have found at least a partial workaround in order to deal with eggs that technically only have one parent… but that’s dealing with a living species whose toolkit you can study and maybe borrow. We have no mammoths, and both the egg and the incubation environment will be elephant, not mammoth.
The article linked ends as is typical of these things with a crack about the sci-fi possibilities of Resurrected Mammoths Gone Rampage, but I would worry less about that and more about getting what amounts to another Asian elephant with a bizarre pedigree, which developed as its available epigenetic switch-thrower instructed. Presumably researchers with a heavy cloning background know a lot more about the pitfalls and how to avoid them than I do, but a great deal of the idea seems to head straight through “here be dragons” developmental biology territory.
March 19th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
This one has ‘lots’ of potential to get out of control… And begs the question, are dinosours next???
March 19th, 2012 at 4:52 pm
If dinosours are half as yummy as Sour Patch Kids, then I’m all for it!
March 19th, 2012 at 5:10 pm
Squid:
Jack Horner called, apparently it’ll end up being like chicken but the tail will lead to another piece in the KFC bucket.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVXdEOiCw8
March 19th, 2012 at 6:08 pm
Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want to turn on a cable news channel and settle in for helicopter footage of a resurrected mammoth on a rampage.
March 19th, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Mike:
Can we place requests? I’ll vote for Congress
March 20th, 2012 at 8:55 am
Detroit NEEDS rampaging mammoths!
March 20th, 2012 at 3:03 pm
It occurs to me that “zOMG those damn scientists are cloning mammoths Jurassic Park is upon us what gun for velociraptor” hysteria is basically identical to “zOMG those damn scientists are building AI Terminator is upon us what gun for T-800″ hysteria and “zOMG those damn scientists are sequencing genomes GATTACA is upon us what gun for Gore Vidal” hysteria. They’re all based on “People are doing something I thought was impossible using tools I don’t understand; it must be dangerous”, and they’re all essentially false because real-world science is much messier and more difficult and time-consuming than movie-plot science.
Not that I don’t want to eat dinosaur steak, mind you….
March 20th, 2012 at 3:12 pm
One assumes that the researchers know better than to splice pig and elephant DNA.
March 20th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
mammoth steaks…mmmm…
March 20th, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Mammoth: WANT. Also, can we breed for smallness? ‘Cos a House Mammoth (or even a Watch Mammoth in the yard) would be so squeefully cute!
…Um, blackfooted kitties, too. Kitties!
March 20th, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Roberta,
Not House Mammoths, but is this close to what you want?
March 20th, 2012 at 7:20 pm
Damn! link won’t embed (probably because I did something wrong). Try youtube for “House Hippos”
March 21st, 2012 at 11:52 am
@Dirtcrasher,
not sure that we could tell the difference between before and after the Mammoth Rampage in D-Town.
Unless it happened to the downtown area, and ruined part of the (nice-and-clean) sports district, or the lobby to the GM Global HQ.
March 21st, 2012 at 4:59 pm
It seems to me that Wooly Mammoths are going to find the world oppressively warm. If we do release them into the wild (yes, I know that would likely be a poor idea) we’ll have to do it in like, Alaska or Siberia or something.
Then we could have three types of elephant. African, Asian, and Alaskan.
And someday there would be videos of polar bears vs: wooly mammoths. Which, SHIT YEAH.
March 23rd, 2012 at 8:57 am
New Animal Planet show, the Wooly Mammoth Whisperer.
Frankly, I’d rather see some DoDo birds brought back.
The whole thing smacks of can-of-worms, though.
March 26th, 2012 at 11:27 am
Yeah, mammoth protecting the little ones from the polar bears, with the wolves hanging around for the leftovers.