--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "I am the eternal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:25 PM, bob_brigante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://tinyurl.com/5zm6ox > > > > By now we're getting use to the surprise that humans aren't so very > different from each other genetically nor are they all that much > different from other creatures. Single genes or even genetic switches > give creatures who seem very remotely different from us the defining > feature which separates us. I was fascinated by a PBS program on > attempts to turn a chicken into a dinosaur by turning on certain > proteins during development. It turns out that the chicken and many > fowl pass through many vestigial dinosaur states while developing. > Things are simpler than we imagined they'd be. >
****** Stay tuned for the new wooly mammoth exhibit at the zoo: "There is no present way to synthesize a genome-sized chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a short-cut would be to modify the genome of an elephant's cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth's genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. Such a project would have been judged entirely impossible a few years ago and is far from reality even now. Still, several technical barriers have fallen in surprising ways. One is that ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze. But a new generation of DNA decoding machines uses tiny pieces as their starting point. Dr. Schuster's laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000. Another problem has been that ancient DNA in bone, the usual source, is heavily contaminated with bacterial DNA. Dr. Schuster has found that hair is a much purer source of the host's DNA, with the keratin serving to seal it in and largely exclude bacteria. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html
