Will the Woolly mammoth be brought back to life?

February 5th, 2011 - 12:25 am ICT by Aishwarya Bhatt  

Tokyo, Feb 4 (THAINDIAN NEWS) A Japanese scientist has an ambitious plan to bring the Woolly mammoth back to life.

The scientist, Professor Akani Iritani of Kyoto University told reporters that there is a “reasonable chance” now to bring the mammoth back on the planet with whatever DNA information that can be found on the remaining fossils of the creatures that got extinct some 5,000 years back.

An earlier attempt in the 1990’s to clone the mammoth back to life failed because it was determined that the DNA information had been damaged.

With that obstacle well in the way, Prof. Akani found the solution in the 2008 work of Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of Kobe’s Riken Center for Developmental Biology. Dr. Wakayama successfully developed a new cloning technique using soft frozen tissues. That technique was used to bring a very rare type of mouse back to life from extinction.

Prof. Akani now hopes that based on that technique, he can extract some part of the nuclei of the mammoth cell and use it for the cloning. The extracted nuclei will then be inserted into the egg of an African elephant.

Prof. Akani believes that the project could lead to the birth of a cloned baby mammoth in 4 to 6 years from now.

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