Nov. 15 (UPI) — The well-preserved remains of a woolly mammoth found in Siberia enabled scientists to extract RNA for the first time and learn more about the animal.<\/p>\n
The woolly mammoth died about 40,000 years ago, but permafrost largely preserved its remains, which enabled scientists to extract a sample of the juvenile mammoth’s RNA,<\/p>\n
The journal Cell on Friday published the Stockholm University research team’s study regarding the successful RNA extraction.<\/p>\n
The successful removal of viable RNA samples is a scientific first and shakes the previously held notion that RNA degrades too fast upon death for scientists to extract useful samples, NBC News<\/a> reported.<\/p>\n “RNA, according to the textbooks, is extremely unstable and basically degrades within minutes after being outside of a living cell,” saidMarc Friedlander, a computational biologist and the study’s lead author.<\/p>\n “It’s so amazingly surprising to find RNA that is 40,000 years old,” he said. “Nobody really thought this was possible.”<\/p>\n RNA is short for ribonucleic acid and is a molecule that converts genes into proteins.<\/p>\n RNA normally degrades quickly, but permafrost preserved it in the young woolly mammoth, which Russian scientists think is a female and named it Yuka.<\/p>\n “It felt like a very high-risk project,” Stockholm University paleontologist Love Dalen told NPR<\/a>. “It seemed like a completely crazy thing to try to do.”<\/p>\n It has wound marks on its hindquarters, which suggests lions living in caves attacked it while it was still living or tried to scavenge its remains.<\/p>\n The scientists removed RNA samples from the young mammoth and several others, three of which proved to be useful, including the sample from Yuka.<\/p>\n “You’re actually seeing processes going on inside the cells right around the time it died,” Dalen said. “These processes have been frozen in time for 40,000 years.”<\/p>\n