San Rafael . A
Bio
Lover of fast cars and protein bars. One day I’m lifting dumbbells, the next I’m lost in a fantasy book or mid-anime binge. Cricket’s a must, and I’ll befriend any pet in seconds. Basically, muscle, mischief, and manga.
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"Resurrecting Legends: The Genetic Revival of the Dire Wolf"
On April 7, a biotechnology company in Texas, U.S., named Colossal Biosciences announced that they had resurrected a dire wolf, a large dangerous predator that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. In a paper uploaded by the company on April 11, Colossal Biosciences claimed that the genomes of the gray wolf and the dire wolf are 99.94% identical, implying that 2.445 billion of the 2.447 billion base pairs were in the same places in the two genomes.Scientists extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf fossils, including a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone.They sequenced the dire wolf genome and identified 20 key genetic differences between dire wolves and their closest living relative, the gray wolf.It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences.The dire wolf genome analyzed to determine what those changes were was extracted from two ancient samples—one a 13,000-year-old tooth, the other a 72,000-year-old ear bone.
By San Rafael . A9 months ago in Earth
