Every year, when the sun arrives in Siberia, a group of explorers sets out in search of mammoths. Colmillo and other shades of these extinct pachyderms frequently appear on the surface, so natives use them to support campaign stores or sell on the black market. In the best case, whoever discovers some of these carcasses is scientific, which could lead to surprising discoveries about Edado del Hierro’s missing fauna.
Now, a team of researchers is announcing the seemingly impossible challenge of rescuing the oldest piece of RNA ever obtained. He was isolated from the remains of Yuka, a mammoth calf chased by a cave lion about 40,000 years ago. Videos recorded by these scientists show that the skin of these animals is amazingly preserved, making them look as if they had been dead for some time.
Until now, RNA, a biomolecule essential to life, was thought to be too fragile to survive the post-mortem period. The study’s authors acknowledge that his mammoth discovery could take knowledge of how the biology of these animals to a new level and possibly help eliminate some of their characteristics.
“By islamizing the ARN, we can better understand what their ecology was like when they were alive,” summarizes Emilio Marmol, lead author of the study. New molecular analysis tools allow us to recover more biological information. Until now, it was possible to extract DNA from mammoths more than 1 million years ago. In some cases, ruins are very well preserved in the cold ground and retain their original three-dimensional structure. Just a month ago, members of this same team successfully rescued DNA from mammoth soil that contained bacteria that lived in its intestinal tract.
Every cell in your body has a complete copy of its genome, or complete DNA, but this information alone cannot tell you whether it’s a skin cell, heart cell, or brain cell. To do this, we need to know which genes are active, where they are, and how much they are active, and RNA provides this information.
This molecule is isolated from animal muscle. This allows us to see which genes were functioning at the time of death. “We found that this is normal muscle tissue, but there are also RNAs associated with stress,” explains Marmol, a 35-year-old Malagueño paleogeneticist working at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Harazgo is collaborating with scientists who several years ago proposed finding Yuka’s remains in Russia’s Yukagir region. The animal was targeting a predator, most likely a cave lion. The findings will be published this month in a scientific journal cell.
Hall opens up a new field. Until now, it was only possible to extract RNA from ancient ruins. In 2019, he managed to escape from a canine tooth pulled out of the permafrost where it lived 14,000 years ago. The production was directed by Tom Gilbert, the current chief of Marmor. The molecule appeared in liver, muscle, and skin remains, which had deteriorated considerably. “To start working on this, we needed to test the concept,” Marmol recalls. Tissues from 10 mammoths were analyzed, and RNA was obtained from three of them. The RNA is also completely conserved, but in the case of Yuca, this is the most complete and unambiguous sequence obtained until the RNA closes. The study made it possible, for example, to determine that the mammoth was a young male rather than a female, as DNA studies had suggested.
Swedish geneticist Love Dalén is also one of the studio’s leading authors. Recently, his team was able to extract DNA from the remains of a mammoth that was more than a million years old. “This result shows that RNA molecules can survive much longer than thought,” emphasizes the scientists in a press release issued by Stockholm University. “This means we will be able to study on the ground which genes are active in a variety of extinct animals, but it will also be possible to sequence RNA viruses such as influenza and coronaviruses preserved in ancient Hierotic sites,” he explains.
Darren is also an advisor to Colossal, an American company that aims to “extinct” mammals by using Asian elephants as plants. Marmol is aware that the company is interested in the tools used to extract RNA from cadavers. This advance will enable a more complete understanding of molecular processes in mammalian biology, particularly DNA.
However, Spanish researchers are “skeptical” about Colossal’s purpose. “I don’t think it’s possible to reintroduce populations of these animals that are sustainable over time, going back to certain internal and external characteristics,” Anyade says. Mr Marmol said the return of the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct over the past three years, was more likely given the intact habitat that remained. In 2023, their team successfully extracted and analyzed RNA from a 130-year-old Tasmanian tiger that had been dissected and displayed in a museum.
“It’s a mistake to recover this kind of information because RNA is very unstable and cannot be stored for very long,” said Nicolas Raskobin, an expert on ancient DNA at France’s Pasteur Institute. Scientists not involved in the study also emphasized that “ARNs, especially messenger ARNs, open the door not only to knowing the genetic information of living things, but also to knowing how to read it, how to express it, and what we can do with it.” One possibility is to compare these processes in detail in mammals and modern elephants. This study has the limitation that only muscle tissue was studied, and as RNA is a highly specific molecule for each organ, conclusions cannot be extrapolated from the characteristics.
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