Scientists are going to clone a bison found in permafrost

Info Mar 11, 2024 0 49 Add to Reading List

The bison was discovered in the summer of 2022 in the Haastach region in the Verkhoyansk region of Russia, after which the sample was donated to the laboratory of the Mammoth Museum of the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk. The specimen is incomplete, but the head, forelimbs and part of the chest are surprisingly well preserved.

Estimated to be about one and a half to two years old, the bison specimen underwent a necropsy, during which muscle, skin and soft tissue samples were taken and the brain was removed.

Establishing the age of this bison will not be easy; previous bison discovered in 2009 and 2010 were dated to approximately 8-9 thousand years ago. The results of tests on the samples, which include radiocarbon dating and microbiological studies, are believed to shed light on the ecology of the bison's habitat and provide information about its geological age.

“Preliminarily, this is a young individual 1.5-2 years old. It has not yet been determined when she died. The geological age of the bison discovered in 2009 and 2010 was 8-9 thousand years, the biological age was about 2 months and 4-4.5 years, respectively,” said Maxim Cheprasov, head of the NEFU Mammoth Museum in a statement.

Given that the tissues are so well preserved in the permafrost, some of the team think it might be possible to use the DNA to clone the sample.

“We are working with a unique find that could be cloned in the future thanks to the selected materials. This is made possible by working together with a strong team of leading scientists at Northeastern Federal University,” said Professor Hwang Woo Seok, Director of the UAE Biotechnology Research Foundation.

It's worth noting that Hwang Woo-seok lost his position at Seoul National University in South Korea after his results were found to be fraudulent, and nearly went to prison for violating medical ethics rules while collecting human eggs. The team was also involved in some controversy after it was revealed that a bear also found in the permafrost, thought to be 22,000 years old, was actually only 3,500 years old.

Cloning any animal is always a complex process, and trying to do it on an animal that has been buried under ice for thousands of years makes the whole endeavor much more complicated.

"To make cloning possible, you need to find intact chromosomes, but what we see even in the best samples is that each chromosome is fragmented into millions of pieces," paleogeneticist Love Dahlen, who is not involved in the study, told Live Science. “In my opinion, it is more likely that you can flip a coin and get heads a thousand times in a row than you can find an intact chromosome in a specimen that is thousands of years old.”

In 2022, scientists successfully cloned mice from freeze-dried cells, but these cells can only be frozen for nine months, not nine thousand years.