Catalogue of genetic differences between woolly mammoths and elephants reveals how ice-age giants braved the cold.
01 May 2015
Unlike their elephant cousins, woolly mammoths were creatures of the cold, with long hairy coats, thick layers of fat and small ears that kept heat loss to a minimum. For the first time, scientists have comprehensively catalogued the hundreds of genetic mutations that gave rise to these differences.
The research reveals how woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) evolved from the ancestor they share with Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). It could even serve as a recipe for engineering elephants that are able to survive in Siberia.
“These are genes we would need to alter in an elephant genome to create an animal that was mostly an elephant, but actually able to survive somewhere cold,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the latest research. As fanciful as it sounds, such an effort is at a very early stage in a research lab in Boston, Massachusetts.
The first woolly mammoth genome was published in 2008 (ref. 2), but it contained too many errors to reliably distinguish how the mammoth genome differs from those of elephants. Other studies singled out individual mammoth genes for close inspection, identifying mutations that would have endowed the animals with light coats3 and oxygen-carrying haemoglobin proteins that work in the cold4.
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