Hope for resurrection?

Scientists have achieved the biological activity of mammoth cells

Sergey Sysoev, "Popular Mechanics"

A team of scientists from Japan has successfully achieved the activity of 28,000-year-old cells taken from a frozen animal carcass found in Siberia. The cell nuclei were implanted into mouse eggs. Several of them showed signs of activity, usually observed before the start of cell division.

An international team of scientists used the cells of a well-preserved mammoth, discovered in 2011 in the permafrost of Siberia, and placed them in several dozen mouse eggs. Five of them demonstrated reactions that occur immediately before the start of cell division. The division itself, however, did not happen.

"This suggests that, despite the years that have passed, cell activity can still be restored," said Kei Miyamoto, a member of the Kindai University team in western Japan. "Until now, a lot of research has focused on analyzing fossil DNA rather than whether it is still functioning."

He warned that the study, the results of which were published on Monday in the journal Scientific Reports (Yamagata et al., Signs of biological activities of 28,000-year-old mammoth nuclei in mouse oocytes visualized by live-cell imaging), does not yet give much hope for the revival of long-extinct species in the style of Jurassic Park. The damage to the cells is very extensive and it will be extremely difficult to bring them back to life, to say the least.

"We have yet to see cell division. I must say that we are very far from the rebirth of the mammoth. We need new technologies, we want to try different approaches," Miyamoto added.

Kindai University plans to test different methods of mammoth revival in cooperation with other Japanese and Russian institutes. The ultimate goal remains unchanged.

In 2011, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reconstructed the mammoth genome by 70 percent, and in 2015, their colleagues from Harvard University transferred 14 genes of the prehistoric animal into the egg of an Asian elephant.

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