Wooly mammoth's secrets traced through hemoglobin
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No one has yet fulfilled the fantasy of many a budding teenage scientist and cloned a woolly mammoth.
But using the DNA from well-preserved mammoths found in northern Siberia, an international team of researchers recently managed to replicate mammoth hemoglobin and study it, lending new insight into just how the extinct relative of elephants managed to survive in such extreme cold during the Ice Age.
"The resulting hemoglobin molecules are no different than going back in time and taking a blood sample from a real mammoth," said team leader Kevin Campbell, an associate professor of environmental and evolutionary physiology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
The findings were released Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics.
A critical part of the research -- recreating the hemoglobin itself -- was done by Chien Ho, a professor of biological science at Carnegie Mellon University and a world-renowned expert on blood substitutes and hemoglobin, which is the blood protein that delivers oxygen from the lungs to tissues in the body. His colleague, Tong-Jin Shen, a senior research scientist who works in Dr. Ho's lab, also helped with the project.
"I can say that I never thought when I first started this work 30 years ago that I would be working with mammoth hemoglobin," said Dr. Ho, who believes this research could also lead to potentially important breakthroughs in his specialty of coming up with blood substitutes for humans.
What Dr. Ho, Dr. Campbell and 12 other scientists -- spread over four continents -- found was that mammoth hemoglobin contained four amino acids that had evolved from its closest cousin, the Asian elephant, that allowed this protein to deliver oxygen efficiently to tissues in mammoths.
First Published May 3, 2010 12:00 am
