Is it possible to clone a dinosaur from its remains? Are dinosaurs cloned? Cloning a creature from a preserved DNA sample, like in the movie "Jurassic Park"

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Cloning animals is becoming commonplace. Gradually, scientists are taking up extinct species and dream of bringing the mammoth and Neanderthal back to life. But what about dinosaurs?

The film “Jurassic Park” revolutionized the world of science: international projects appeared to study the remains and DNA of ancient lizards, and the number of paleontologists increased 4 times. Everyone was motivated by interest and the desire to give a definitive answer to the question of whether it is possible to clone those who lived on Earth 60 million years before the appearance of man.

Since the early 2000s, scientists' opinions have varied. Skeptics said goodbye to their childhood dream: even if they possess such technology, people are unlikely to use it to recreate a dinosaur that has no place in the modern world. But there are those who think differently.

website briefly explains how scientists hope to revive ancient fossils in the near future and what results can be talked about today. Dedicated to everyone who dreamed of seeing a live tyrannosaurus - do not despair, there is still hope.

But skeptics warn that even if a dinosaur-like creature hatches in the future, it will always be a chicken first and foremost, not an ancient species of lizard.

Now: There is a way to activate in birds those genes, thanks to which sharp teeth grow again on the beak, the tail familiar to a dinosaur develops, and paws. This is how scientists gradually edit the chicken’s DNA, programming the embryo to develop body parts that ancient lizards had.

4. Cloning a creature from a preserved DNA sample, like in the movie “Jurassic Park”

When the movie Jurassic Park came out, the ability to clone a dinosaur with a blood sample seemed incredibly promising. In 2007, it was possible to extract collagen protein from the bones of a tyrannosaurus and read fragments of its DNA, and two years later they isolated proteins from the bones of an 80-million-year-old brachylophosaurus.

This idea is reminiscent of a time machine: first clone or create likenesses of those whose DNA has been preserved intact, then use the genes of these creatures for further work. And perhaps create a brave new world, similar to the one that existed millions of years ago.

Modern technologies make it possible to bring recently extinct animals and birds back to life. Success requires intact DNA, whose age does not exceed 500 thousand years, a surrogate mother from among living close relatives, a suitable ecological environment for the development of the organism, and a little luck.

Today, Harvard scientists, led by geneticist George Church, are trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth using genes from modern elephants. In fact, this is the creation of a new genome manually. The resulting animal will not be an exact replica of a mammoth, but it will be similar.

Other contenders to return to the world of the living include white rhinoceroses, the passenger pigeon, heath grouse and those critically endangered such as horseshoe crabs and the American ferret.

2. We are looking for unknown forms of life on our planet in order to study the mechanisms and functions of genes, create new species and resurrect old ones

edited by cryobiology. Although some creatures are able to live for several days in a state of hibernation, being frozen. At the moment, scientists have not developed a method that will help start life processes in the body, which has been exposed to low temperatures for a long time.

Now: Worms from Yakutia, frozen 40 thousand years ago in the permafrost region, have become a mystery to science. Recently they were resurrected thanks to scientists: the ice was melted and the worms came to life. It is still difficult to say how their adaptation to the modern world will go: new bacteria and viruses have appeared that these worms have never encountered. It's a problem that cryogenics enthusiasts who hope to freeze themselves today to be revived in the distant future are being warned about.

Of course, scientists may be wrong in certain theories, but, as Jules Verne said, “everything that a person can imagine in his imagination, others can bring to life.”

Which extinct creature would you like to see alive?

03/09/2016 at 01:28

The idea of ​​cloning dinosaurs from fossil remains was especially relevant after the release of the film “Jurassic Park,” which tells how a scientist learned to clone dinosaurs and created an entire amusement park on a desert island, where you could see a living ancient animal with your own eyes.

But a few years ago, Australian scientists under the leadership of Morten Allentoft and Michael Bunce from Murdoch University (Western Australia) proved that it is impossible to “Recreate” a living dinosaur.

Researchers radiocarbon dated bone tissue taken from the fossilized bones of 158 extinct moa birds. These unique and huge birds lived in New Zealand, but 600 years ago they were completely destroyed by the Maori aborigines. As a result, scientists found that the amount of DNA in bone tissue decreases over time - every 521 years, the number of molecules is reduced by half.

The last DNA molecules disappear from bone tissue after about 6.8 million years. At the same time, the last dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, that is, about 65 million years ago - long before the critical threshold for DNA of 6.8 million years, and there were no DNA molecules left in the bone tissue of the remains that paleontologists were able to find.

“As a result, we found out that the amount of DNA in Bone Tissue, if kept at a Temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius, decreases by half every 521 years,” said the head of the research team, Mike Bunce.

“We Extrapolated this Data to Other, Higher and Lower Temperatures and Found that If Bone Tissue is Maintained at a Temperature of Minus 5 Degrees, the Last DNA Molecules Will Disappear in Approximately 6.8 Million Years,” he added.

Sufficiently long fragments of the genome can only be found in frozen bones no more than a million years old.

By the way, to date, the most ancient DNA samples have been isolated from the remains of animals and plants found in permafrost. The age of the found remains is about 500 thousand years.

It is worth noting that scientists will conduct further research in this area, since differences in the age of the remains are responsible for only 38.6% of the discrepancies in the degree of DNA destruction. The rate of DNA decay is influenced by many factors, including the storage conditions of the remains after excavations, the chemical composition of the soil, and even the time of year in which the animal died.

That is, there is a chance that in conditions of eternal ice or underground caves, the half-life of genetic material will be longer than geneticists assume.

How about a mammoth?

Reports that scientists have found remains suitable for cloning appear regularly. Several years ago, scientists from the Yakut Northeastern Federal University and the Seoul Center for Stem Cell Research signed an agreement to work together on cloning a mammoth. Scientists planned to revive the ancient animal using biological material found in permafrost.

A modern Indian elephant was chosen for the experiment, since its genetic code is as similar as possible to the DNA of mammoths. Scientists predicted that the results of the experiment would be known no earlier than in 10-20 years.

This year, messages from scientists from the North-Eastern Federal University appeared again; they reported the discovery of a mammoth that lived in Yakutia 43 thousand years ago. The collected genetic material suggests that intact DNA has been preserved, but experts are skeptical - after all, cloning requires very long DNA chains.

Living clones.

The topic of human cloning is developing not so much in a scientific manner as in a social and ethical one, causing controversy on the topic of biological safety, self-identification of the “New Man”, the possibility of the emergence of defective people, and also giving rise to religious controversy. At the same time, animal cloning experiments are being carried out and have examples of successful completion.

The world's first clone, the tadpole, was created back in 1952. Soviet researchers were among the first to successfully clone a mammal (house mouse) back in 1987.

The most striking milestone in the history of cloning living beings was the birth of Dolly the sheep - this is the first cloned mammal obtained by transplanting the nucleus of a somatic cell into the cytoplasm of an egg devoid of its own nucleus. Dolly the sheep was a genetic copy of the cell donor sheep (that is, a genetic clone.

Only if, under natural conditions, each organism combines the genetic characteristics of its father and mother, then Dolly had only one genetic “Parent” - the prototype sheep. The experiment was carried out by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at the Rosslyn Institute in Scotland in 1996 and was a breakthrough in technology.

Later, British and other scientists conducted experiments on cloning various mammals, including horses, bulls, cats and dogs.

Once upon a time, giant, majestic monsters roamed our planet - dinosaurs. They swam, flew, ate each other and plants, multiplied, evolved. We felt “at ease”. Until problems with volcanoes appeared, which smoothly turned into the fall of a powerful asteroid. Thus came the end of the dinosaurs. We know they existed because we find their remains buried millions of years underground. But what if you took the DNA of a dinosaur, pulled it out of the dust and tried to recreate the great lizard?

When paleontologists discovered a clutch of Jurassic dinosaur eggs in China in 2010, Steven Spielberg immediately protected the rights to his notorious film. But paleontologists rejoiced at a much less glamorous use for eggs: the ability to figure out how such large creatures grew from such small eggs.

Is it possible to resurrect dinosaurs and return them to this world? Paleontologist Jack Horner argues that we know very little about the issue of resuscitation. After studying the microscopic structures of several bones, Horner found that some dinosaurs, or rather their skeletons, developed similarly to some descendants of birds. And just as the cassowary doesn't grow its distinctive crest until late in life, some dinosaurs retained juvenile features well into adulthood. But paleontologists were wrong when they tried to analyze the bones: five key features from the Cretaceous period are believed to have belonged to juvenile versions of known dinosaurs. It seems that figuring out exactly how dinosaurs reproduced was much simpler.

After this, the question arose about the need for more information. In 2010, a breeding colony of lufengosaurus was discovered. It contained about 200 complete bones of long-necked dinosaurs, along with fragments of bones and eggshells - about 20 embryos at various stages of development. According to various estimates, the age of the find was 190-197 million years. These are the oldest dinosaur embryos ever found.

The find was enough to keep paleontologists and dinophiles excited for a couple of weeks, but there was more to it than that. In “marginal notes,” the scientists wrote that along with the bones they found “organic remains that are probably a direct product of the breakdown of complex proteins.” Hence the question: can we resurrect dinosaurs?

Now this question is no longer shocking, but the answer is still “no.” Despite the amazing leaps forward in genetics and genomic research, the practical problems of obtaining and cloning dinosaur DNA make Jurassic Park impossible even if society allowed it and the church agreed to the final test.

Dinosaur eggs

Could the discovery of dinosaur eggs pave a new path for reptiles to this planet? No. Dinosaur eggs lay for tens and hundreds of millions of years, their shelf life expired a long time ago, and they also became fossilized - this is not material for an incubator. Embryos are just a pile of bones. It won't help either.

Regarding organic material, can dinosaur DNA be extracted from it? Not really. Paleontologists constantly argue about the suitability of organic matter, but DNA has never been extracted (and, apparently, never will be able to).

Take, for example, the Tyrannosaurus rex (which is a rex). In 2005, scientists used weak acid to extract weak and pliable tissue from the remains, including bone cells, red blood cells and blood vessels. However, subsequent studies showed that the find was just an accident. People got really excited. Additional analysis using radiocarbon dating and scanning electron microscopy showed that the material under study was not dinosaur tissue, but bacterial biofilms - colonies of bacteria linked together by polysaccharides, proteins and DNA. These two things look quite similar, but have more in common with dental plaque than with dinosaur cells.

In any case, these findings were very interesting. Perhaps the most interesting thing we haven't found yet. The scientists perfected their techniques and, when they got to the lufengosaurus nest, they braced themselves. Captivating? Absolutely. Organic? Yes. DNA? No.

But what if it's possible?

there is hope

Using frozen cells, scientists successfully cloned a Pyrenean ibex known as a bucardo in 2003, but it died within minutes. For years, Australian researchers have been trying to bring back to life a southern species of mouth-feeding frog, the last of which died decades ago, but their venture has so far been unsuccessful.

This is how, stumbling and cursing at every step, scientists give us hope for more ambitious resuscitations: mammoths, passenger pigeons and Yukon horses, which became extinct 70 thousand years ago. This age may be confusing at first, but just imagine: that's one-tenth of a percent of the time the last dinosaur died.

Even if dinosaur DNA were as old as yesterday's yogurt, numerous ethical and practical considerations would leave only the craziest of scientists among those who would support the idea of ​​resurrecting dinosaurs. How are we going to regulate these processes? Who will do this? How will resurrecting dinosaurs affect the Endangered Species Act? What will failed attempts bring, besides pain and suffering? What if we resuscitate deadly diseases? What if invasive species grow on steroids?

Of course, there is growth potential. Like the representation of wolves in Yellowstone Park, a “rollback” of recently extinct species could restore balance to disturbed ecosystems. Some believe that humanity owes a debt to the animals it has destroyed.

The DNA problem, for now, is a purely academic issue. It is clear that resurrecting some frozen baby mammoth from a frozen cage may not arouse much suspicion, but what to do with dinosaurs? The discovery of a Lufengosaurus nest may be the closest we've ever gotten to Jurassic Park.

As an alternative, you can try to crossbreed an extinct animal with a living one. In 1945, some German breeders claimed that they were able to revive the aurochs, the long-extinct ancestor of modern cattle, but scientists still do not believe this event.

Genetic engineering is one of the most revolutionary sciences. Scientists are still discussing its possible ban. And while they are arguing, the cloning process is successfully underway in scientific laboratories. Everyone is interested in knowing how things are going with dinosaur cloning.

There is a dubious theory according to which the DNA of a dinosaur can be isolated from the blood of a female mosquito that bit it. This insect is supposedly preserved in amber. This dinosaur clone successfully appeared in the film Jurassic Park.

Of course, it is unlikely to find such a mosquito that bit a pangolin a second ago and immediately fell into a drop of pine resin. It is also highly doubtful that dinosaur DNA in its pure form could be preserved in amber. The hypothesis itself leads to only one conclusion - DNA must be searched for or somehow recreated, but how exactly is still difficult to say.

Almost all Scientific minds are very skeptical about the possibility of finding dinosaur DNA. They give the following reasons: 1. Over the course of 500,000 years, any DNA structure can collapse if it is not exposed to low temperatures. 2.no one has yet managed to find whole DNA; these are always short pieces of a chain that cannot be connected. 3. The most difficult thing is to sift out the pieces of genetic material we need from foreign DNA that was introduced by chance later or simply belongs to bacteria from the era of life of a given dinosaur.

But when a person has a dream, then “the fairy tale becomes reality.” And the impossible becomes possible.

2010 can be called a breakthrough year in the history of DNA reconstruction. 50-75 thousand years ago, extinct ancient people, the Denisovans, lived on Earth together with the Neanderthals. Paleontologists managed to find the remains of a Denisovan girl. Experts were able to decipher the child’s genetic code, since know-how had been developed before this

— reconstruction of fragments of a DNA molecule consisting of a single chain. This discovery became the basis for further clues to evolutionary development on Earth.

year 2013. another breakthrough! The remains of an ancient horse were found in permafrost. They are 550 - 780 thousand years old. Scientists manage to read this genome.

Then another sensation - specialists manage to decipher the mitochondrial DNA of Heidelberg man. This type of Neanderthal lived approximately 400 thousand years ago. In parallel with this, work is being successfully carried out on the genetic structure of the remains of a bear that lived at the same time. The most surprising thing is that the remains of both man and bear were found not in permafrost, but in a warmer climate. What does this mean? It is possible to clone ancient animals not only from frozen remains, but to expand the area of ​​searching for DNA fragments using a new technique.

This technique, like all ingenious things, is simple. To purify the desired DNA from the presence of foreign DNA, Scientists created a so-called DNA template: gene sequences of 45 nucleotides were taken (longer chains are unlikely to be preserved) with existing mutations that occurred after the death of an individual (certain nucleotide substitutions appear after the death of a cell). Then, after analyzing this piece of genetic material, they found the closest DNA, which made it possible to build the correct chain of genes. This is reminiscent of working on puzzles - the overall picture is there, you just need to put it together correctly in small pieces. The Denisovan genome was best suited for this purpose.

This method only works when there is the following base:

1.successful template for genome reconstruction

2. a sufficient number of DNA chain fragments.

We gain new knowledge and a new template with each new transcript. And we delve into the study of more accurate historical events. But so far all these discoveries are limited by a period of no more than 800,000 years. So what about the dinosaurs that lived on Earth from 225 to 65 million years ago? Over such a long period of time, not a single intact DNA molecule would have been preserved, but even here science does not stop at one place.

In the Chernyshevsky region, scientists discovered fragments of fossilized skin of a dinosaur that lived in the Jurassic Period. Scientists have raised the question of real cloning of dinosaurs. Dozens of news agencies showed interest in Transbaikalia in connection with this discovery. Foreign and Russian Scientists came to the institute and admitted that they had never seen anything like this in their lives.

Cloning, of course, has not yet been put on the conveyor belt, and experiments are still being conducted in private or departmental university laboratories. Russian researchers are now hard at work cloning a mammoth. The mammoth genetic material itself is not very difficult to obtain. Let us remember the baby mammoth Dima, who was found whole. Actually, mammoths lived only a few thousand years ago, so their frozen remains have been found more than once in Siberia. There is evidence that back in the 19th century, Siberian hunters fed their dogs mammoth meat. Of course, making a clone of a mammoth from an entire preserved chain of DNA and good quality protein is not very difficult for specialists.

It's much more difficult to clone a dinosaur. According to Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences Sofia Sinitsa, the period of DNA decay depends on the conditions under which the remains are found and is 500 thousand years. And we must take into account that dinosaurs went extinct approximately 65 million years ago. But many of them lived 150 million years BC. WELL, HOW DO YOU FIND DINOSAUR DNA? The shelf life of DNA baffles researchers. After all, organic tissue is transformed into minerals over millions of years. In rocks that can be analyzed, it actually does not exist. Sofya Sinitsa places a special emphasis on the fact that nothing works with dinosaur skin, in which organic matter could be preserved, and therefore cloning of dinosaurs will have to be done only after geneticists have successfully cloned a mammoth. The scientist promises that in order to find the source material for cloning lizards, she will “dig up all of Siberia.”

You remember very well from the school curriculum that DNA plays the function of transmitting hereditary information. If one of the researchers can find one single completely preserved cell with a complete set of DNA molecules, then further cloning of an exact copy is simply a matter of technology. For example, take the egg of a modern Komodo dragon, destroy the original DNA, and introduce DNA molecules from any species of dinosaur into the egg. Now you can put the egg in a special incubator and wait for the birth of the little dinosaur.