【英语时差8,16】科学家找出长毛象基因组上取得重大进展

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

The sequence comes from DNA² in hair snipped³ from two woolly mammoths whose bodies have been preserved in Siberian permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Important gaps in the picture remain, but even so, enough data is there to make a comparison between the woolly mammoth and its closest living relative, the elephant, they said.

The two species are so similar that their DNA differs by just 0.6 percent, or about half the differences between humans and chimps⁴.

The team made a first breakthrough last year by using mammoth hair to extract mitochondrial DNA, genetic⁵ material that is inherited from the female line.

The hair technique marks a giant's step forward compared to the previous method, which consisted of teasing DNA out of the remains⁶ of frozen bone marrow⁷.

Rebuilding the mammoth's genetic code has fired speculation⁸ that scientists may one day revive this species and other Ice Age beasts on the lines of the Hollywood movie "Jurassic Park."

Researchers say it should one day be theoretically possible to replicate⁹ a mammoth by taking the elephant's genome, stripping out the code that is specific to the elephant and replacing it with code specific to the mammoth.

分享到：