Harvard University researchers have inserted woolly mammoth genes into living cells from an Asian elephant... with success! The Asian elephant is the hairy giant's closest known relative that remains on the earth since the woolly mammoth went extinct more than 4,000 years ago.
Geneticist George Church used DNA from woolly mammoth samples found in the Arctic permafrost and copied 14 mammoth genes.
"We prioritized genes associated with cold resistance including hairiness, ear size, subcutaneous fat and, especially, hemoglobin," Church told News UK's The Sunday Times.
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) - essentially a cut-and-paste for DNA, was used to insert the genes into the Asian elephant skin cells.
"Just making a DNA change isn't that meaningful," Church told Popular Science. "We want to read out the phenotypes."
So what will scientists do now that functioning mastodon DNA is swimming in a petri dish? Hybrid elephant/mammoth embryos could be grown in artificial wombs or places in surrogate wombs - the latter idea getting a thumbs down from animal rights groups.
"It's going to be more humane and easier if we can set up hundreds of [embryos] in an incubator and run tests," Church said, according to Popular Science.
An elephant that can withstand colder temperatures might be a way to keep the pachyderms away from humans (specifically poachers), Discovery News suggested.
If more DNA is introduced to the elephant cells, there is a possibility that the woolly mammoth could "de-extinct."
