Nature’s impeccable preservation of the creatures indicates that intact pieces of the past may still be out there.
A 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth was impeccably freeze-dried by nature, its swatches of fur remaining intact — remarkably enough — and allowing a global team of scientists to reconstruct the creature’s three-dimensional genome for the first time.published Thursday in the journal Cell about mammoths inspires a new way of looking at ancient DNA samples that may hold more information about the past than previously thought.
“This work is about the fact that under certain circumstances, ancient samples can be preserved in this special way about which we didn’t know,” said Olga Dudchenko, another study author and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. The researchers realized that although the ancient DNA in their mammoth sample had fragmented during the past 52 millennia, the diffusion of the fragments throughout the skin cells was relatively modest.“The idea that molecules as small as the ancient DNA fragments can get stuck for long periods of time — so the geometry can survive tens of thousands of years later — is surprising. It’s physically remarkable,” Aiden said.
By using information about where chromosomes were located within the cells, the authors could spot genes that may be responsible for differences between the mammoth and the elephant — namely, the genes that led to hair growth and the mammoth’s ability to stay warm in cold environments.
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