Zoological Collections - Woolly Mammoth

• We can now sequence extinct animal genomes
• origin of elephants in Africa, migrated to Europe and Asia like humans
• M. meridionalis
  • 4 metres tall
  • 10 tonnes
  • woodland adapted species
  • Western Europe across Asia across the land bridge to America
• M. trogontherii
  • steppe adapted
  • pushed meridionalis into Western Europe
• M. columbi (Columbian Mammoth)
  • Grasslands
  • Large and hairless
  • North America
• Woolly Mammoth (M. primigenius)
  • 500,000 years later
  • Pushed M. trogontherii out through central Europe
  • Migrate back and forth over land bridge to America
  • 3,000 years ago, still lived on some Siberian islands, then went extinct
  • Millions of remains in permafrost

• Survival of DNA depends on:
  • when the organism dies
  • how quickly the organism is buried
  • depth of burial
  • constancy of temperature
    • temperature matters the most

Within the bones and teeth that survived fossilisation, the DNA that was once intact and tightly wrapped around histone proteins is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically alongside the mammoth during its lifetime. These bacteria (along with environmental bacteria) break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller DNA fragments until the fragments are between 10 to (in the best case scenarios) a few hundred base pairs long. Most fossils are devoid of organic signatures. In the tooth or bone of the mammoth is the mammoth's DNA, but also bacterial symbiotes and environmental contaminants. A mammoth in permafrost will have around 50% of its own DNA whilst one in a temperate environment (such as the Colombian Mammoth) will only have 3 to 10%. We can remove the Mammoth DNA and put them on the backbone of an African or Asian Elephant chromosome. 

Mammoth genome = 5 billion base pairs (compared to a Hominid's 3 billion)

• African elephants, Asian elephants and Mammoths have a shared ancestor 7 million years ago
  • Asian elephants and Mammoths share an ancestor about 6 million years ago
• Woolly and Colombian Mammoths interbred
• We can put the Mammoth genome into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, then differentiate that stem cell into a sperm cell. Then that sperm cell is used to artificially inseminate an Asian elephant.
• the result won't truly be a Woolly Mammoth if we do bring them back due to the fragmented DNA in the preserved specimens
• Northern Siberia and the Yukon have been identified as being able to potentially house Woolly Mammoth