According to Fox News:
Woolly Mammoth's DNA Almost Fully Deciphered
and Bloomberg.com
Woolly Mammoth Genome Sequence May Bring Beast Alive
The Telegraph (British newspaper) is very concerned about the possibility (see note):
Do we really need to bring back the mammoth?
But are we really that close?
The one scientist (and senior author on the Nature paper), Dr. Stephan Schuster, quoted in all of these articles is excited about the possibility of bringing back the mammoth using elephant DNA as a backbone for existing sequenced mammoth DNA. In interviews, he is quoted as saying that 80% of the genome is sequenced. However, a quick read of the journal article shows that somewhere between 50-70% of the genome is sequenced. The actual amount of genome sequenced is not known since the size of the genome is unknown and the amount of overlapping DNA is not known.
The error rate of sequencing (estimated) is about 0.35%, meaning there are about 35 errors per 10,000 nucleotides. This sounds very low until you consider that there are about 3.3 billion mammoth base pairs sequenced, so there are somewhere around 11.5 million errors in the known sequence. This is just a problem with low sequence coverage, but there is no talk (so far) of sequencing more of the mammoth genome. That means that there is nothing even in the works to do the very first beginning step towards "cloning" a mammoth.
Several news articles attempt to circumvent the problem of the missing sequence by saying that, like in "Jurrassic Park", the DNA of a living relative of the mammoth could be used to fill in the gaps. This is problematic due to our lack of understanding of DNA function. That is, if we took a random chunk of 100 base pairs of DNA, there is a VERY good chance that we would not know what it is used for - if anything! That is because the part of DNA that we can most easily understand, the portion that codes for protein, makes up less than 2% of total genomic DNA (according to the Human Genome Project). That means that any gaps we fill in combined with the known error rate of the sequencing would make for an extremely buggy mammoth. If any of these bugs were in genes important for survival we would get no animal at all. If there were a bug in a gene involved in a mammoth specific function, we would get some sort of mammoth-like creature that might be fun to look at, but likely scientifically irrelevant.
Another problem is that there is no real reason to make the cloning technology available, making it unlikely that this technology will be developed in the next couple of decades as suggested by the news articles. Without this technology, even a buggy mammoth could not be made - and a buggy mammoth is not a good enough reason to spend huge amounts of resources on this kind of project.
Living animals with >8X genome coverage haven't been cloned, or even talked about to my knowledge, using other animals DNA as a backbone. For example, there are 6 Drosophila (fruit fly) species with more than 3X genome coverage.
The mammoth sequence is a big deal, don't get me wrong. But only the blissful scientific ignorance of the media allows "Jurrassic Park" type scenarios to even be entertained at this early point. The biggest selling point for a elephant/mammoth hybrid is the amazing similarity of the protein coding regions - 99.78% animo-acid identity between the mammoths and african elephants. However, this interesting fact was not quoted in most news articles, leading me to believe that the journalists have not read the primary data. The main point of the paper, in my opinion is that this data could form the basis for understanding those tiny DNA differences that result in the large differences between mammoths and elephants. For examples - tolerance to cold, dietary and behavioral differences. Doing this sort of analysis between an extinct species and a living one could really be an eye-opener in understanding the way that evolution works and why some species go extinct when others do not.
Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth - Miller et al, Nature 2008
Human Genome Project InformationMammoths are fracking cool via Nova scienceNOW
note: but keep in mind this is also the same newspaper than said the mammoth genome was complete under this doozy of a headline:
