"It was 2012 when Love Dalen, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, first laid eyes upon a special specimen on a lab table in eastern Siberia. "Our Russian collaborators said, 'Come here into this room,'" he recalls. "We walked in and there's this dead mammoth lying there. It doesn't look like it died yesterday, but you can't believe your eyes because it's so well preserved. It's a kind of holy hell moment when you see this.""
"It had remained buried and frozen for millennia. Now, in a paper published in the journal Cell, Dalen and his colleagues report that they managed to extract something remarkable from that ancient mammoth RNA, the molecule that translates genes into proteins and which tends to degrade rapidly. The results offer a glimpse into what was happening inside this ancient mammoth's cells when it died."
Yuka, a juvenile woolly mammoth thawed from a Siberian permafrost cliff, lived about 39,000 years ago and remained buried and frozen for millennia. The carcass bears deep hindquarter scratches consistent with attack or scavenging by cave lions. Previously sequenced DNA provided the mammoth's genetic recipe; researchers recovered intact RNA from Yuka's tissues, a fragile messenger molecule that usually degrades rapidly. Sequenced RNA offers a snapshot of gene expression and cellular processes at or near the time of death, revealing which genes were active. The findings enable study of ancient physiology, stress responses, and postmortem cellular states in Ice Age organisms.
Read at www.npr.org
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