Woolly Mammoth Clone Project: Can It Be Resurrected?

Woolly Mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) were elephant-like creatures that lived more than 120,000 years ago (from Pleistocene epoch to Holocene epoch), long after the dinosaurs went extinct.

Woolly Mammoths are believed to share a common ancestor with modern-day elephants, only that the former is more adapted to colder climates. However, the exact phylogeny and how divergence occurred over time is still not elucidated.

• During the ice ages, the Woolly Mammoth is believed to thrive in the steppe grasslands of North America over the land bridge of Beringia.
• Like other herbivores, the Woolly Mammoth helped maintain the grasslands in the ancient Arctic ecosystems. They do this explicitly by running into trees and dispersing grass seeds in their fecal matter.
• When they disappeared, the grasslands turned into the modern-day mossy taiga and tundra ecosystems, which are now starting to melt and liberate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists think that the tundra ecosystems have the highest carbon risk among all of the forests in the world combined.
• Interestingly, humans have witnessed the existence of the Woolly Mammoths as numerous cave paintings of them have been found in Spain and France.
• Also, mammoth bones were used to create tools during burial ceremonies. However, except for fossils preserved in ice, the Woolly Mammoth is now extinct.

Known as the Woolly Mammoth Project, the de-extinction project is spearheaded by a Harvard-based team with Dr.George Church as the team leader. The cloning process will utilize the CRISPR genetic engineering process to copy and paste Mammoth genetic material into live fibroblast cell cultures from elephants.

• At present, numerous Mammoth genes have already been encoded into elephant cell lines, which resulted in some already “mammoth-like” cells.
• Aside from that, the genetic engineering of various character traits like hemoglobin production, adipose tissue production, hair growth, and adaptation to cold climates have already been encoded in the fibroblast cell lines.
• After that, the said cell lines will be engineered to become cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells, also known as “immortal cells,” will be used to create cells from three primary body layers and can eventually generate cells and tissues on their own.
• The Woolly Mammoth stem cells will be used to create cells to study the mutation effects on the character above traits.
• When the traits have successfully been incorporated into the tissues, the next step in the cloning process would be the generation of embryos using stem cell embryogenesis. An artificial womb/uterus will carry the Woolly Mammoth embryo. In particular, Asian elephants will be surrogate mothers to gestate the embryos.
• While the said plan may appear seemingly impossible, two previous scientific discoveries have paved the way for the development of this present study. Such breakthroughs include the transfer of fetal lambs to artificial lambs and the healthy birth offspring from the 3D-printed ovaries of infertile mice.
• According to the scientists, once embryos have been successfully produced, young cloned Woolly Mammoths will be grown in cold temperatures to prepare for their living in the wild.
• Moreover, once a stable population of clone mammoths has been obtained, the group will be placed in the identified restoration sites in the Arctic, particularly in Siberia.

To get a hold of the Woolly Mammoth DNA, scientists, before this current project, obtained bones from a Woolly Mammoth that existed more than 12,000 years ago. After that, DNA fragments from the bones were amplified to generate numerous copies of the target genes.

Fortunately, many of these DNA fragments overlapped, so scientists could get a picture of what the genome looks like. The results of the analyses showed that the Woolly Mammoth has more than 95.8% similarities with the modern-day Asian elephant.

• Despite these vast similarities, scientists believe that more than 2,000 genetic mutations (i.e., non-protein coding ones) have been expressed in modern-day elephants. Furthermore, they think that some of these mutations include the character trait of adaptation to cold climates.
• While genetic material has already been obtained from the Woolly Mammoth, one major dilemma of this project is the absence of viable DNA for cloning. Because of being frozen for long periods, some DNA has already been degraded or trimmed.
• The Scientists have figured out how to solve this problem: altering the modern-day elephant genome to recreate the mammoth genome. With this, of course, the resulting product will not be precisely identical to the extinct one but undoubtedly closely related.

As the developments and innovations in the field of biotechnology continue to increase, the idea of reviving an extinct species may come true in the future. The Woolly Mammoth is an ideal species to be resurrected because some intact mammoth fossils are still available, and it still has close living relatives.

• In this scientific endeavor, scientists and researchers want to learn the ways of nature and make artificial living organisms using synthetic biology. Many scientists believe the genetic material of prehistoric animals to be important records of information about adaptation and evolution.
• To do this, an organism’s character traits expressed in the cells, tissues, as well as behavior needs to be studied.
• In the case of extinct animals, “de-extinction” will allow the study of prehistoric data where the mere identification of the genome cannot give. In particular, the information about the Woolly Mammoth blood will give important data about the adaptation of mammalian blood to survive in cold climates. Such knowledge will be beneficial in the study of diseases in humans.
• Ultimately, the goal of this “de-extinction” project is for species to re-populate the boreal and tundra forests of North America, Europe, and Asia. The goal is not to create exact copies of the extinct Woolly Mammoth but to observe the adaptations of these organisms to survive in cold climates. The knowledge of such will be beneficial in the conservation and preservation of the population of elephants in Asia.

Of course, when there are advantages, there are also disadvantages attached to the revival of the Woolly Mammoth. One of the biggest enemies of animal cloning is ethics. Like any other scientific procedure involving the manipulation of natural creation, de-extinction via the cloning process is deemed unethical and contrary to many people’s religious and moral views.

• Another challenge to this process is the difference between the kinds of environments where these species once thrived and the environments we have now.
• Critics of these kinds of de-extinction projects believe that rather than focusing on the reviving of long-dead species, modern-day technologies should center more on the conservation and restoration of living organisms and endangered ones.