Re: News: Frozen mice cloned - are woolly mammoths next?

On Nov 4, 5:48 pm, spintronic <spintro...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 4, 5:40 pm, Woland <jerryd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Nov 4, 12:30 pm, spintronic <spintro...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Nov 4, 2:04 pm, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Frozen mice cloned - are woolly mammoths next?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081103/sc_nm/us_clones_frozen_2

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox, Health And
Science Editor   – Mon Nov 3, 5:30 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Japanese scientists have cloned mice whose
bodies were frozen for as long 16 years and said on Monday it may be
possible to use the technique to resurrect mammoths and other extinct
species.

Mouse cloning expert Teruhiko Wakayama and colleagues at the Center
for Developmental Biology, at Japan's RIKEN research institute in
Yokohama, managed to clone the mice even though their cells had burst.

"Thus, nuclear transfer techniques could be used to 'resurrect'
animals or maintain valuable genomic stocks from tissues frozen for
prolonged periods without any cryopreservation," they wrote in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wakayama's team used the classic nuclear transfer technique to make
their mouse clones. This involves taking the nucleus out of an egg
cell and replacing it with the nucleus of an ordinary cell from the
animal to be cloned.

When done with the right chemical or electric trigger, this starts the
egg dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm.

"Cloning animals by nuclear transfer provides an opportunity to
preserve endangered mammalian species," they wrote.

"However, it has been suggested that the 'resurrection' of frozen
extinct species (such as the woolly mammoth) is impracticable, as no
live cells are available, and the genomic material that remains is
inevitably degraded," they said.

DIGGING INTO FREEZERS

Wakayama's team dug out some mice that had been kept frozen for years
and whose cells were indisputably damaged. Freezing causes cells to
burst and can damage the DNA inside. Chemicals called cryoprotectants
can prevent this but they must be used before the cells are frozen.

They tried using cells from several places and discovered that the
brains worked best. This is a bit of a mystery, as no one has yet
cloned any living mouse from a brain cell.

Many animals have been cloned, starting with sheep, and including
pigs, cattle, mice and dogs. Livestock breeders want to use cloning to
start elite herds of desirable animals, and doctors want to use
cloning technology in human medicine.

"There is hope in bringing Ted Williams back, after all," cloning and
stem cell expert John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania said
in an e-mail. The family of Williams, the Boston Red Sox hitter, had
his body frozen by cryogenics firm Alcor after he died in 2002.

Gearhart was only half-joking and said the study "may now stimulate
the small industry of freezing parts of us before we die to bring us
back in the future."

Mammoths may be the extinct animals that scientists would be most
likely to try to clone, as many of the animals have been found
preserved in ice.

In July 2007 Russian scientists discovered the body of a baby mammoth
frozen in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region for as long as 40,000
years.

"It remains to be shown whether nuclei can be collected from whole
bodies frozen without cryoprotectants and whether they will be viable
for use in generating offspring following nuclear transfer,"
Wakayama's team wrote.

--
Bob.

You have no idea what you are talking about, do you?

Uh, it was a news article. He wasn't talking about anything.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

He said "are wooly mamoths next"?

If he understood the article, he would understand the chasm he is
trying to traverse.

I think he does - not that he personally intends to traverse it, I
expect. Tissue remains frozen for a few years, or for a few thousand
years. But the basic principle is the same. Frozen material is
preserved. Mammoth DNA, being older, might need some repair and
reconstruction done to produce whole chromosomes, or not even that.

But I worry about things like this undermining public acceptance of
conservation. Mammoths didn't die out just by accident, but because
the world became a place where they couldn't survive. That may or may
not have been because we're in it, but for many present-day dying
species it is our doing, by climate change, habitat destruction,
hunting... Letting species die out because we can bring them back
again is the back-to-front logic that I'm afraid of. There's nowhere
to live to bring them back /to/.

.

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