Clone a mammoth? Unreal!
Mammoths and dinosaurs will not "resurrect" even in the distant future
RIA News
The reconstruction of extinct animals – mammoths and dinosaurs, which the media and the public expect, is not achievable in the near future, and most likely, this task cannot be solved at all, says Nikolai Yankovsky, director of the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Extinct animals, recreated by the hands of scientists, are popular heroes of popular culture. The plot of the cult film "Jurassic Park", which gave rise to numerous imitations and a fashion for dinosaurs, is based on the fact that a geneticist managed to extract the DNA of an extinct lizard from the blood he received from a mosquito immured in a piece of amber, and easily raised living dinosaurs. The successes of recent years in deciphering the genetic text (DNA molecules) of mammoths have given rise to expectations in society of the imminent "return" of these ancient animals.
Jankowski says these expectations have little to do with reality.
"For today, this is a technical problem that has not been solved, and it is unknown (in relation to animals, at least) whether it will ever be solved," the scientist said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
He explained that the researchers really learned how to synthesize fragments of a gene and whole DNA molecules, moreover, experiments were conducted to introduce such a synthesized molecule into the cell of a microorganism, which then began to live. However, this does not mean that you can inject any DNA into any cell to get a living being.
"Everything was collected in a test tube. But we can't make a cage. And I think we will never be able to. The cell, the shell in which the gene is located, is specific to each species. The chromosome is different, but this shell, in which the chromosome is located, is different. The compatibility of the shell with its contents is important, at least for animals. Do you think that if you put Ivan Ivanovich's chromosomes in the cells of even the cutest chimpanzee, then Ivan Ivanovich will be born to her?" the scientist said.
In his opinion, there is "a certain philosophical gap".
"We understand a lot about how DNA works and what it does. But there is no formalization of the carrier, which, in fact, is alive – cells. But without it, we can't make a cell, we don't know all its elements, we don't know how to synthesize it," says the geneticist.
"Yes, we can reproduce the full genetic text from the DNA fragments that are preserved in the remains. Theoretically, this is possible. But we will not be able to recreate the cell – it has died forever," he said.
In addition, according to Yankovsky, there is a deadline after which DNA cannot be deciphered.
"This period relative to the lifetime of life is very small – 30 thousand years, and life exists for about 3 billion (years)."
"We can decipher the mammoth genome, but we can't decipher dinosaurs. And, most likely, we will not be able to, because it will not be possible to go deeper than 30 thousand years. There, the genetic text will be fragmented to single "letters"-nucleotides. This is similar to the situation with a broken typographic matrix – you still have the letters, but the text is no longer there. That is, we will not be able to find out the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA molecule, and it is the sequence that determines how one species differs from another. The letters are the same for all types... And in Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are being restored, the remains of which have lain about 2 thousand times for 30 thousand years," the scientist says.
Theoretically, he added, if you need to resynthesize the ancestor of an animal, you can make an assumption about what it was. What is in the DNA of its modern descendants undoubtedly came from an ancestral organism.
"For example, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs are birds. But something was added to the DNA of birds on the evolutionary path from a common ancestor with a dinosaur, and something was lost. And what exactly is unknown. There is nothing to compare it with. This is the main problem," the scientist said.
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