This Plan to Bring Back an Extinct Ice-Age Horse Species Is an Extreme Long Shot, Sci

saltwn · #1 (**permalink**) 12-28-2018, 12:15 AM

This Plan to Bring Back an Extinct Ice-Age Horse Species Is an Extreme Long Shot, Scientists Say

Quote:

A team of scientists in Siberia is hopeful that a mummified 40,000-year-old baby horse can provide critical genetic material for cloning the extinct ice-age species.

But experts told Live Science that they are skeptical that the scientists will be able to find viable DNA on the body at all, let alone overcome the enormous challenges of cloning a species that's been extinct for millennia.
Revived after millennia?

The preserved foal's body was discovered in August and was excavated from melting permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, a region in eastern Russia. Researchers working with the frozen remains recently told The Siberian Times that they are investigating whether the remains will yield living cells that could be used to clone the ancient baby horse. [See Photos of the Perfectly Preserved Ice-Age Foal]

According to The Siberian Times, one of the scientists involved in the analysis of the mummified horse is Woo-Suk Hwang, a stem-cell researcher and cloning pioneer from South Korea. Hwang, a former professor at South Korea's Seoul National University, came under fire in 2006 for falsifying data, and was convicted three years later of bioethical violations and embezzlement, Nature reported in 2009. He now helms Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a South Korean company that researches and performs animal cloning — primarily dogs, Live Science previously reported.

Scientists from Russia and South Korea — including Hwang — are already collaborating in an attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, and they are now exploring the possibility of extracting living cells from the preserved horse, which could potentially be used to create a clone, Hwang told The Siberian Times.

"If we find only one live cell, we can clone this ancient horse," Hwang said. "We can multiply it and get as many embryos as we need."

Quote:

An extinct horse could prove easier to clone than a mammoth because a modern horse could serve as the embryo's surrogate, while a cloned mammoth embryo would need to be implanted in a female elephant, Hwang explained. Elephants are in the same family as extinct mammoths, but they are not close relatives — so a cloned "mammoth" would more likely be a genetically engineered elephant-mammoth hybrid, he said.

Nevertheless, cloning an extinct ice-age horse could be a step toward cloning a mammoth, as "it will help us to work out the technology," Hwang told The Siberian Times.
"Astronomical" odds

However, several scientists who were not involved with the analysis of the foal expressed doubts that it would be possible to successfully clone the mummified horse.

"Many of [the] same challenges will be faced here as with attempts to clone mammoths," Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email.

Cloning is possible only when the original animal's DNA is intact, and the majority — if not all — of the DNA in ice-age specimens is typically degraded "into tens of millions of pieces," Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told Live Science in an email.

If enough DNA from the mummified horse's remains can be recovered, scientists might be able to construct a genome sequence by comparing the DNA of the extinct foal to the genomes of living horses, Shapiro added.

But the chance of finding an undamaged nucleus with an intact genome, or even a frozen cell that could be recovered, "is astronomical," Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, told Live Science in an email.

"Scientists rarely say something is impossible, but it is certainly approaching it," Lynch said.

macabre

mr wonder · #2 (**permalink**) 12-28-2018, 07:07 AM

GottaGo · #3 (**permalink**) 12-28-2018, 07:29 AM

Why? What could be the purpose of this?

They have Dolly, they know it can be done, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

saltwn · #4 (**permalink**) 12-28-2018, 11:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GottaGo

Why? What could be the purpose of this?

They have Dolly, they know it can be done, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

exactly.

mr wonder · #5 (**permalink**) 12-29-2018, 06:58 AM

lots of tracks to consider with this.
the should we even do this is 1st one.
and I agree with you guys the answer should be, "nope".
Nearly All the arguments against dr Frankenstein and Jurassic Park apply seems to me. As well as animal cruelty concerns.

some of the other issue to note here are the what they are saying about the science.

1. they need a "living" cell.
so it's possible, but EXTREMELY unlikely, that "a" cell frozen thousands/10s of thousands of years ago could be alive and revived?
seriously?

2. Cloning is possible ONLY when the DNA is "intact" but Most of the DNA of the horse has degraded and is broken "into tens of millions of pieces,".
but they want to try and reconstruct the pieces ... based on looking at living horses DNA.

Oookkkk um
this is the same thing mentioned in Jurassic Park. And here's the thing.
they have found dinosaur DNA. And Stretchy nearly intact dinosaurs cells.
(if they were Millions of Years old they would have degraded thus refuting the millions of years time scale for dinosaurs BTW)
https://kgov.com/dinosaur-soft-tissu...gical-material
http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...&v=Fey-24KrXnE

You Tube

jimbo · #6 (**permalink**) 12-29-2018, 10:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GottaGo

Why? What could be the purpose of this?

They have Dolly, they know it can be done, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Dolly's parents were both live animals. This foal is long dead.

saltwn · #7 (**permalink**) 12-30-2018, 03:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr wonder

lots of tracks to consider with this.
the should we even do this is 1st one.
and I agree with you guys the answer should be, "nope".
Nearly All the arguments against dr Frankenstein and Jurassic Park apply seems to me. As well as animal cruelty concerns.

some of the other issue to note here are the what they are saying about the science.

1. they need a "living" cell.
so it's possible, but EXTREMELY unlikely, that "a" cell frozen thousands/10s of thousands of years ago could be alive and revived?
seriously?

2. Cloning is possible ONLY when the DNA is "intact" but Most of the DNA of the horse has degraded and is broken "into tens of millions of pieces,".
but they want to try and reconstruct the pieces ... based on looking at living horses DNA.

Oookkkk um
this is the same thing mentioned in Jurassic Park. And here's the thing.
they have found dinosaur DNA. And Stretchy nearly intact dinosaurs cells.
(if they were Millions of Years old they would have degraded thus refuting the millions of years time scale for dinosaurs BTW)
https://kgov.com/dinosaur-soft-tissu...gical-material
http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...&v=Fey-24KrXnE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-K7_H27Wq4

there may be enough missing in the string to warrant splicing it w/ live tissue-if their goal is to clone. like everything may be there but one mechanism that makes the rest work. they would use a compatible amount of
modern horse DNA to complete the process.
imho when an article gets to the public it's probably old news in the scientific world. and money can buy a lot of research.
ever since DNA was mapped , rest assured a good component and an equally bad one started the march toward their preferred genre of bounty.
on one side you cure cancers, on the other someone's no doubt inches away from a mega monster.

mr wonder · #8 (**permalink**) 12-30-2018, 09:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saltwn

there may be enough missing in the string to warrant splicing it w/ live tissue-if their goal is to clone. like everything may be there but one mechanism that makes the rest work. they would use a compatible amount of
modern horse DNA to complete the process.
imho when an article gets to the public it's probably old news in the scientific world. and money can buy a lot of research.
ever since DNA was mapped , rest assured a good component and an equally bad one started the march toward their preferred genre of bounty.
on one side you cure cancers, on the other someone's no doubt inches away from a mega monster.

they said it's in millions of pieces, broken and missing.
it won't be just 'one thing' to fix it.

the biggest issue IMO is that still don't understand everything the parts do.
even on a level of organs, there are still some that some biologist claim are "useless" but they keep finding out that these so-called useless parts are functional. and then they started to discover new biological systems, even in the human body.
with DNA it's FAR more unknown, and FAR more complex than the complexity of the known organ system of man, and that's been studied for thousands of years.
they just mapped the DNA molecular a few years ago they have VERY little idea of all the functions of each of the millions of bits of CODE that goes into human beings much less other animals.
they've discovered that the DNA CODE is not just read by the CODE reading parts forwards, to give instructions to make toenail for instance, but it's also read backwards, and 3 dimensionally to give instrutions for other functions or the timing of other functions and those are not exactly known. Plus they've found that the genes are being read across areas in a wireless way giving instructions for proteins and such to perform certain functions. the level of complexity is FAR beyond what any computer code ever written or imagined. (BTW all the code we know about is made by an intelligent code writer... not random chemicals, events and time)

But they are taking bits and pieces from ONE animals code and at best clumsily nailing it together with another animal. they have no real clue what may be missing or what the combo will or won't do in itself or out in nature as food, predator or even it's bodily secretions.
The parts MAY look the same in many ways but the unknown elements are many.

It's Doc Frankenstein activity, where the already created biology itself is doing most of the work. Doctors are putting together functional pieces, from one puzzle into another, and seeing what they get.
most of it will and is broken and dysfunctional in some way. btw. Dolly the sheep had a lot of medical problems. and that was made from directly from a living animal.

It's all fascinating theoretically but seems to me the scientist don't know as much as they seem to want to put on. And playing out these composite creatures in real life is not something we should do lightly, if at all.

I'm kind of surprised the environmentalist haven't pushed back hard against some of this. Introducing new creatures into our ecosystem is a stressor on nature that no one can predict the outcomes of. It's already caused problems in the plant world with franken-plants of some of the big Agra Companies taking over natural ones in various areas in the Americas.

Plus creating lone living animals seem a bit cruel on it's face.

saltwn · #9 (**permalink**) 12-31-2018, 01:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr wonder

they said it's in millions of pieces, broken and missing.
it won't be just 'one thing' to fix it.

the biggest issue IMO is that still don't understand everything the parts do.
even on a level of organs, there are still some that some biologist claim are "useless" but they keep finding out that these so-called useless parts are functional. and then they started to discover new biological systems, even in the human body.
with DNA it's FAR more unknown, and FAR more complex than the complexity of the known organ system of man, and that's been studied for thousands of years.
they just mapped the DNA molecular a few years ago they have VERY little idea of all the functions of each of the millions of bits of CODE that goes into human beings much less other animals.
they've discovered that the DNA CODE is not just read by the CODE reading parts forwards, to give instructions to make toenail for instance, but it's also read backwards, and 3 dimensionally to give instrutions for other functions or the timing of other functions and those are not exactly known. Plus they've found that the genes are being read across areas in a wireless way giving instructions for proteins and such to perform certain functions. the level of complexity is FAR beyond what any computer code ever written or imagined. (BTW all the code we know about is made by an intelligent code writer... not random chemicals, events and time)

But they are taking bits and pieces from ONE animals code and at best clumsily nailing it together with another animal. they have no real clue what may be missing or what the combo will or won't do in itself or out in nature as food, predator or even it's bodily secretions.
The parts MAY look the same in many ways but the unknown elements are many.

It's Doc Frankenstein activity, where the already created biology itself is doing most of the work. Doctors are putting together functional pieces, from one puzzle into another, and seeing what they get.
most of it will and is broken and dysfunctional in some way. btw. Dolly the sheep had a lot of medical problems. and that was made from directly from a living animal.

It's all fascinating theoretically but seems to me the scientist don't know as much as they seem to want to put on. And playing out these composite creatures in real life is not something we should do lightly, if at all.

I'm kind of surprised the environmentalist haven't pushed back hard against some of this. Introducing new creatures into our ecosystem is a stressor on nature that no one can predict the outcomes of. It's already caused problems in the plant world with franken-plants of some of the big Agra Companies taking over natural ones in various areas in the Americas.

Plus creating lone living animals seem a bit cruel on it's face.

yeah I already indicated I don't go for the idea. Was just explaining what their process is here.
As a side note: DNA was mapped in the 90s.

mr wonder · #10 (**permalink**) 12-31-2018, 05:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by saltwn

yeah I already indicated I don't go for the idea. Was just explaining what their process is here.
As a side note: DNA was mapped in the 90s.

Yep,
but to me the 90's is just "a few years ago"... shows my age.

Quote:

https://www.genome.gov/11006943/huma...ked-questions/
...
2003
Is the human genome completely sequenced?

Yes - within the limits of today's technology, the human genome is as complete as it can be. Small gaps that are unrecoverable in any current sequencing method remain, amounting for about 1 percent of the gene-containing portion of the genome, or euchromatin. New technologies will have to be invented to obtain the sequence of these regions.

However, the gene-containing portion of the genome is complete in nearly every functional way for the purposes of scientific research and is freely and publicly available. Even though the Human Genome Project is now completed, scientists will continue to develop and apply new technologies to the few remaining refractory problems. For its part, NHGRI will continue to support a wide range of research to develop new sequencing technologies, to interpret the human sequence and to use the newfound understanding of the human genome to improve human health.

Didn't you announce the human genome sequence was complete three years ago at a White House ceremony?

On June 26, 2000, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced the production of a rough draft of the human genome sequence. In April, 2003, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium is announcing an essentially finished version of the human genome sequence. This version, which is available to the public, provides nearly all the information needed to do research using the whole genome.....

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