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A bioscience and genetics company announced on Monday (13) the investment of 15 million dollars (about 78 million reais) to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. For recreate the extinct animal about 10,000 years ago, the researchers plan to use part of the genome of Asian elephants.
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O giant known for its inverted and elongated tusks it was a plant-eating mammal that inhabited the coldest areas of the globe, a feat made possible only by the two layers of thick fur that kept its blood warm.
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The audacious project that promises to bring back to life creatures of the Ice Age was announced by the American company Colossal, founded by Ben Lamm, a technology and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a geneticist pioneering the approach to gene editing and a professor of genetics at Harvard.
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According to them, bringing the woolly mammoth represents not only a great advance for science in the possibility of reversing the scenario of extinct species, but also a way to combat climate change.
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Is it possible to bring extinct species back to life?
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According to Colossal, yes. However, the idea is not to make exact copies of the extinct giant, but to adapt it using part of the asian elephant’s DNA, the living animal that has the greatest number of mammoth-like genes.
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“Although the Woolly Mammoth is not alive walking the tundra, the animal’s genetic code is almost 100% alive in today’s Asian elephants. Precisely, the two mammals share a similar 99.6% DNA composition.“, argue the scientists.
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To do this, the researchers will create embryos using cells taken from the skin of Asian elephants and, in the laboratory, will reverse the stages of these cells until they become stem cells, which are more versatile cells that carry the DNA of mammoths.
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Specific cells responsible for the characterization of skin, prey, fat layer and other characteristics that make mammoths adaptable to the coldest regions of the globe will be identified from the comparison with the genome extracted from the carcass of mammoths recovered in the permafrost -name given to the permanently frozen layer below the Earth’s surface.
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“Thanks to its habitat in permafrost, tundra and frozen steppe regions, many mammoths that died never completely deteriorated – instead, they remained sealed in ice to be discovered later. Thus, collected tissue samples contain intact DNA, undigested food in mammoth stomachs, fur, prey and much more“, say the researchers.
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If these processes are successful, the embryos will be taken to a surrogate or an artificial uterus, where they will be gestated. The gestation of an elephant, if it develops without problems, lasts 22 months.
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How could it help fight climate change?
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According to the researchers, Mammoths could help fight the advance of climate change bringing back the original tundra vegetation, which more resembles a grassland than what is currently covered by mosses.
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This would help to prevent the permafrost from heating and, consequently, thawing.
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Researchers estimate that the permafrost holds nearly 1.7 trillion tons of carbon trapped, that is, almost double the carbon dioxide (CO2) present in the atmosphere.
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