Eli Tsakiris
Mr. Mathieu
Period 1
Monday March 10th, 2014
Published: August 19th, 2013
Summery: Scientists are now trying to recreate animals that went extinct hundreds of years ago. However, people wonder what the practical use for this will be, is it just a tool to undo humanities errors, or will it prove to be helpful in the future. The first animals being worked on was the ancient woolly mammoth, an animal that existed millions of years ago. Professor Adrian Lister described the process as difficult, and told reporters, "The DNA has become fragmented and shattered. You've got an alphabet soup of bits and pieces of DNA left in that frozen tissue." Researchers are trying to piece together the DNA fragments collected from Mammoths in the past, in order to use the same technology as was applied to the cloned sheep “Dolly”. Scientists believe that inserting a Woolly Mammoth gene into an unfertilized reindeer or bison egg, could result in a sort of a Woolly Mammoth hybrid that could later be defined into a more accurate Mammoth. However people wonder the effects of introducing old animals into new ecosystems, since Woolly Mammoths have ancient ecosystem needs, the newer environments may not be compatible with them. In addition many researchers urge scientists to focus their energy on keeping more species from going extinct.
Connection: This article connects to our unit on Molecular Genetics, because it talks thoroughly about the process of DNA fingerprinting and the steps to clone an animals using DNA recombination. The article outlines similar steps we used in extracting DNA from ants, except the extracted Mammoth DNA must then be sequenced and connected. We talked about the process of how inserting foreign genes into an unfertilized egg could produce a genetically different offspring. In addition, the article touches upon ecosystem stability and the effects of introducing a new organism into an already stable ecosystem. We talked about these topics earlier in the year during our unit on ecosystems.
Would the new Woolly Mammoth be able to survive if its genes were inserted into a reindeer/bison egg?
ReplyDeleteWhat animal would the fertilized egg be put into to grow?
ReplyDeleteCaroline - Its possible that the Woolly mammoth would be able to survive if its genes were inserted into a near relatives egg. However, scientists worry that since ecosystems that now exist in the wild are so vastly discrepant from those that existed during the ice age, the modern day world may be incompatible with Woolly Mammoths. If we could find an ecosystem with a climate and food close to the variables that existed millions of years ago, its possible the cloned Woolly Mammoths could survive.
ReplyDelete