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PSU Scientists Sink Their Teeth into Woolly Mammoth DNA: Gene Sequencing Made Possible By New Technique, Bone Samples

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa., The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.

Dec. 20--A new technique combined with unique bone samples have given scientists at Penn State and McMaster University in Canada a chance to study the genes of a 28,000-year-old woolly mammoth.

"This is something that was previously believed to be very difficult or not possible," said Stephan Schuster, one of the researchers on the project and an associate professor at Penn State's Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics.

Once an animal dies, the DNA inside its cells degrade at a rapid pace, he said.

But a technique involving a high-throughput sequencing machine -- Penn State has one of only about 10 of these machines in existence -- combined with mammoth bones that had been preserved in Siberian permafrost, made the successful genome sequencing possible, Schuster said.

The project, which also involved paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History and researchers in Russia, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, began in November and is part of a "super hot" field of research, Schuster said.

"We demonstrated that 50 percent of the total DNA extracted from the bone was mammoth," Schuster said in a Penn State news release.

"This allowed us to compare hereditary information from the cell's nucleus of today's African elephants with the one from this ancient species."

The mammoth's DNA is 98.5 percent identical to that of an African elephant, according to the news release.

The rest of the extracted material was microorganisms and plants from the soil.

Webb Miller, a collaborator on the project at Penn State, said in the release that he believes the study shows that any organism preserved in ice will offer useable DNA to researchers.

Global warming might actually aid these efforts. Schuster said that because of climate changes, many glaciers are receding, meaning scientists will likely have greater access to frozen fossils.

Hendrik N. Poinar, associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University assisted with the study. McMaster University, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Penn State provided funding for the project.

Schuster said the scientists hope to find funding to complete the mammoth genome sequencing and comparative studies with the genomes of African and Indian elephants.

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.

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Source: Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.)

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