Officials are confident that attempts to clone an extinct animal should bear fruit someday, reports nat-geo.ru.
The pace of development of modern technologies and science makes it possible to talk about the possibility of cloning a mammoth in the near future, said the head of Yakutia Aisen Nikolaev.
“I am sure we will still see living mammoths walking along the Yakut tundra,” said the head of the republic.
According to the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev, Yakutia intends to make the mammoth fauna its own brand, including tourism.
“Now the mammoth, from a symbol of antiquity, eternity, paleontology, in a sense can turn into a symbol of modern science, which really promotes Yakutia. That is, it will be not only a tourist brand, but a scientific brand of Yakutia, ”- Alexander Sergeev.
Nikolaev also reported on the primary tasks in the study of mammoth fauna. One of them is to bring the mining of mammoth bone into the sphere of legal regulation.
In Russia, more than 80% of the remains of the mammoth fauna are concentrated in the territory of Yakutia, which is about 500 thousand tons.
Attempts to extract suitable material for cloning from the remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) have been going on for decades. With the melting of the permafrost, the remains of ancient animals began to be found more and more often, and scientists expect to find suitable samples.
However, the likelihood of such a scientific breakthrough in the coming years is still small. Cloning mammoths according to the classical technology, when the nucleus of a living cell is inserted into the egg, is impossible. In the soft tissues of mammoths, even very well preserved, there are no such cells.
In samples of frozen tissue, it is sometimes possible to find individual whole nuclei of cells, but when the remains of ancient animals thaw, they are destroyed, and scientists do not yet have the technology that allows you to preserve the structure of the cell during thawing.
