Even closer to mammoth cloning
Now scientists have found mammoth tissue they need to recreate the giant animal in the course of four years.
A year ago, researchers announced that they could clone the mammoth - all they needed was a frozen soft tissue.
Now they think they have found mammoth remains the need in the permafrost of Siberia.
The elephant surrogate mother
Professor Akira Iritani tried already in the nineties to clone mammoths, but were not utilized mammoth tissue from the Siberian tundra due to cold damage to the cells.
In 2008, Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Development Biology, technology is the ability to clone a mouse that the mouse cells - has been frozen for 16 years.
Iritani use Wakayama technique to identify the core of potentially usable mammoth cells, before he pulls out the healthy cell nuclei.
Cell nuclei will be placed in the eggs of an African elephant who will act as mammoth surrogate mother.
The Kyoto-based researcher estimates that it will take two years before the elephant can be fertilized, and with a gestation period of 600 days will it then take 4 years before a mammoth eventually born.
To be recreated from the femoral
Mammutlarbeinet to be found as early as August, but the report shows that this material is very likely is usable only came now.
Sven Valla, a professor of molecular genetics at NTNU, said earlier this year to that he thought this sounded unlikely.
- If they do it in four years they must have come further than I thought, but their success is the more plausible theoretical.
At that time, he pointed out that everything was going to stand on if they found the cells with the entire genetic mass intact, which they then hope to have done.
- If we had decided we would have gotten it right. There is no hocus-pocus.
