Scientists to clone mammoth

Elephant eggs? How do they climb the trees to lay them in the nest?

Of course what they'll actually get - if anything - is not a mammoth at all, but an elephoth. Or possibly a mammaphant. Such a crossbreed, in the unlikely event of it a) existing b) surviving and c) being free from genetic defect, will almost certainly be, mule-like, infertile, thus making the whole business of further breeding to produce a mammoth stock a tad difficult.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

If the cloning was sucessful they would have a mammoth, wouldn't they. All the elephant DNA would be removed from the egg which would basically just be a container for the mammoth DNA.....i think???

J.

I don't think that's how it works .... I shall have to read up on it, but I seem to recall reading that DNA is not (as people often think) a list of instructions containing all you need to assemble your own mammoth; the 'instructions' also include things like 'cook in a female mammoth for a bloody long time'. So the egg will still be an elephant egg, and the host will still be an elephant, and this will have an effect on the result.

I may well be wrong about this ... help ... PSD? Anybody?



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

It probably depends on how similar the eggs are. The instructions to cook in a mammoth for a long time will work in getting the egg cooked in the elephant?? I don't really know though.

J.

If you look in one of the posts about dodos, I mention this, but replace mammoth with dodo and elephant with pigeon.

With the hybrids, they breed them to create something more like the original mammoth, and continue until it is 100% mammoth. I assumed that if a dodo/pigeon hybrid (Pido? Dogeon?) were possible, the same could be done.



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Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart are the experts to read on this subject - lucid, intelligent and refreshingly devoid of academic flights of fancy. There is a long section about it in one of their books, and I'll try and remember to check which one it is later.



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

I think the Cohen/Stewart book involving cloning mammoths etc was "The Collapse of Chaos", but there may be others.

There's the mitochondrial DNA to consider, because the standard cloning method only affects the cell's nucleus, too...

Do any of you know whether any zoos still have stocks of the "Aurochs" and "Tarpan" that were [re]created by selective breeding from domestic cattle & horses respectively back before WWII? Were these all in German zoos, and wiped out during the war by stray bombs &/or hungry townsfolk?

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Post Edited (07-18-03 15:04)

They do, in fact, denucleate the egg being used (thus the "denucleated dove egg" on the dodo home cloning kit tin), so the nuclear DNA is all from the mammoth. The mitochondrial DNA would be the only DNA present from the Elephant, and I doubt it would have an enormous effect on the final product. Mitochondria are the organs in the cytoplasm which produce ATP (engery) using oxygen. Their function is very similar in all animals, and they are inherited purely from the maternal parent (in the egg), which is why they've been useful in matralineal lineage tracing.

For dodo's DNA there would be far more problems, because we do not have frozen, perfectly preserved dodo cells (and as they aren't from a cold climate, we're not apt to ever have any). You'd be more apt to get fragmented and incomplete DNA, which would have to be cloned piecemeal into another animal to give it some dodolike characteristics. Thus the need for another similar species to fill in the missing bits.



Post Edited (07-21-03 16:16)

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"I've often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around."
--Ross Smith

I suspect the hardest part would be geting a compatible placenta to form, actualy. Anti-rejection drugs? Could work, I guess.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

What size would a mammoth calf be compared to an elephant calf, could an elephant actually carry one?

Pretty similar, IIRC.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

How similar is mammoth milk to elephant milk ? Probably close enough for an experiment to work. Wonder how big a bucket you'd need for milking elephants ?

If you look for a magazine called Newton (possibly Australian) there was a 3 or 4 page article on what each successive genaration of elephoths would look like, in issue No. 5.



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Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

Dr Jim Slip once got a clear plastic cover for his holy PC (early days of home computers). I referred to it as 'the elephant's contraceptive'.

Magda, your pithy explanation of mitochodria made me hysterical for a moment because for some reason I couldn't help flashing on what was probably the most ridiculous scene from The Phantom Menace about the, er, genesis of Annikin Skywalker....still laughing, actually....

Oh, and about apostrophes (I wish I'd had this on hand the other day): "The Oxford Rule: It's is not, it isn't aint, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs." Another gem from the Joy of Lex.

"Grin :-)" at the Oxford Rule. The explantory material in the annotated version of Alice's adventures that I mentioned reading a couple of days ago mentioned that Lewis Carroll insisted on some of the later of the editions of the 'Alice' books that were published during his own lifetime replacing "can't with "ca'n't" and won't" with "wo'n't" (or was that "wi'n't"? I don't have the book with me, and so ca'n't check up about the latter detail...).

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Warning! Product may contain Newts!

FWIW, I do generally know the rules for apostrophes, it's just that when I'm typing quickly I occassionally throw them in before an s automatically, without noticing. I also sometimes spell words incorrectly even when I know the correct spelling. I cracked someone up once by spelling tongue as tounge. She ended up picturing a tongue shaped chaise lounge.

Except it's called a chaise longue . . .

(Sorry, my pedantic tendencies are showing. I used to be a proofreader -- it's an occupational hazard.)



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Maybe it is there (and on about 51,400 websites), but here (and on about 57,700 websites) it's spelled chaise lounge.