"Every year, when the thaw arrives in Siberia, groups of explorers set out in search of the mammoth. Tusks and other bones from these extinct pachyderms surface so frequently that locals use them to prop up their tents or sell them on the black market. In the best-case scenario, those who find some of these carcasses are scientists, leading to extraordinary discoveries about the vanished fauna of the Ice Age."
"Until now, it was thought that RNA a biological molecule essential for life was too fragile to withstand the passage of time after death. Its discovery in a mammoth increases our understanding of how these animals' bodies functioned to a new level, and may possibly help to de-extinct some of their traits, the s Isolating RNA allows us to understand much better what their biology was like when they were alive, summarizes Emilio Marmol, lead author of the study."
Every year explorers recover mammoth tusks and bones from the Siberian thaw, sometimes used locally or sold. A roughly 40,000-year-old mammoth calf named Yuka yielded the oldest RNA ever recovered, overturning assumptions about RNA fragility after death. RNA recovery enables determination of which genes were active in specific tissues, revealing tissue-specific biology unavailable from DNA alone. Previous work extracted DNA from mammoths over a million years old, and some remains retain three-dimensional structure. Recent analyses also recovered intestinal bacterial DNA. Recovering ancient RNA expands molecular understanding and may inform attempts to resurrect or reintroduce lost traits.
Read at english.elpais.com
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