Molecular Genetics

(submitted by AB) Imagine a world where pigeons and squirrels frolic about campus. The occasional feral cat dashing across west mall. Rove herds of woolly mammoths grazing around the MLK statue…

It seems that the genome of the extinct mammoth has been sequenced. This will allow scientists to compare the sequences with modern elephants to study differences that might shed light on their origins and their demise.
Several new techniques were employed including isolating the DNA from only the hair of mammoth mummies. In doing this, contaminating DNA from bacteria and fungi can easily be eliminated. The hair follicles serve to protect the DNA also.

It may be possible clone portions of the mammoth’s DNA and swap it in to elephant DNA using homologous recombination. With successive generations, we could repopulate Sarahpalinia with mammoths to support the hunting tourism industry. Molecular genetics at its best.

This is a fascinating story of a gene fusion event. Last year, in a paper published in PNAS in collaboration with Richard Cordaux (now at the University of Poitiers, France) and Mark Batzer (LSU), the authors reconstructed the evolutionary history of a primate fusion gene called SETMAR. It serves as a good introduction to the kind of questions that arise from molecular genomics and the study of mobile DNA It will also provide an example of how transposons and other forms of so-called ‘junk DNA’ can, on occasions, make themselves useful in the genome. Finally this is a story that generated quite a bit of discussion on the web including theology, GM foods, and evolution.

Scientists are extracting DNA from the dense coats of woolly mammoths in an effort to learn more about them.

Mammoths are extinct, of course. No one knows if the cause was climate change, hungry Neanderthals or something else — but they left behind remains, often frozen in the tundra. Attempts have been made to sequence their DNA from frozen animals, but that can be complicated by contamination. Researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, however, that mammoth hair seems to be an excellent source of well-preserved DNA.

“It is important to understand the genetic makeup of an organism before it went extinct,” explained lead researcher Stephan C. Schuster of Penn State University. “We want to use this to sequence (the DNA from) museum specimens and therefore help to understand the evolution of species by using museum collections that date back several hundred years,” Schuster said.

Indeed, the technique could be used to measure the DNA from specimens collected by such naturalists as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Linnaeus.