It’s been 4,000 years since the elephant-like beast walked the earth, but part of its DNA now operates inside several litters of mice created by scientists at the Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences. The mice don’t have their characteristic short, gray-brown coat, but rather the long, wavy, woolly hair of the mammoth. They also have the beast’s accelerated fat metabolism, which helped it survive earth’s last ice age. Both traits are the result of gene editing that Colossal’s scientists hope will hasten the reappearance of the mammoth itself as early as 2028.
Colossal has been working on restoring the mammoth ever since the company’s founding in 2021. The animal’s relatively recent extinction and the fact that it roamed the far north means that its DNA has been preserved in multiple remains embedded in permafrost. For its de-extinction project, Colossal collected the genomes of nearly 60 of those recovered mammoths.
The mice come in because re-creating a species from raw biological material is painstaking. It involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth from the Asian elephant—its close evolutionary relation—editing the genome of an elephant embryo, and implanting it into the womb of a modern-day female elephant. After 22 months (the typical elephant gestation period), an ice-age mammoth should be born into the computer-age world. But speed bumps abound.
The business of rewriting the genome takes extensive experimentation with hundreds of embryos to ensure that the key genes are properly edited. The only way to test if they indeed are is to follow the embryos through gestation and see if a viable mammoth pops out; the nearly two years it would take for even a single experimental animal to be born, however, would make that process impractical.
What’s more, Asian elephants are highly social, highly intelligent, and endangered, raising ethical obstacles to experimenting on them. Enter the mouse, an animal whose genome is well understood and easy to manipulate and whose 20-day gestation makes for a quick turnaround from embryo to mouse pup.
IN THE CURRENT EXPERIMENT, researchers identified seven genes that code fo...
Colossal has been working on restoring the mammoth ever since the company’s founding in 2021. The animal’s relatively recent extinction and the fact that it roamed the far north means that its DNA has been preserved in multiple remains embedded in permafrost. For its de-extinction project, Colossal collected the genomes of nearly 60 of those recovered mammoths.
The mice come in because re-creating a species from raw biological material is painstaking. It involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth from the Asian elephant—its close evolutionary relation—editing the genome of an elephant embryo, and implanting it into the womb of a modern-day female elephant. After 22 months (the typical elephant gestation period), an ice-age mammoth should be born into the computer-age world. But speed bumps abound.
The business of rewriting the genome takes extensive experimentation with hundreds of embryos to ensure that the key genes are properly edited. The only way to test if they indeed are is to follow the embryos through gestation and see if a viable mammoth pops out; the nearly two years it would take for even a single experimental animal to be born, however, would make that process impractical.
What’s more, Asian elephants are highly social, highly intelligent, and endangered, raising ethical obstacles to experimenting on them. Enter the mouse, an animal whose genome is well understood and easy to manipulate and whose 20-day gestation makes for a quick turnaround from embryo to mouse pup.
IN THE CURRENT EXPERIMENT, researchers identified seven genes that code fo...
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Time (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 24, 2025