A Fresh Attmpt To Clone Mammoths

Since the nuclei taken from skin and muscle tissues from mammoths found in the Siberia ‎were badly damaged, earlier efforts in the 1990s to clone mammoths had failed.
‎
But in 2008 Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, working at the Riken Centre for Developmental ‎Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse using a technique developed by him, by ‎using skin cells of a mouse that had been frozen for over 16 years. Based on this ‎approach, Akira Iritani, a professor working at Kyoto University, is planning to clone and ‎resurrect the mammoths that became extinct about 5,000 years ago. He plans to identify a ‎relatively good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth for the above purpose. He is ‎planning to apply Dr Wakayama’s techniques to obtain the nuclei of viable mammoth ‎cells before proceeding to extract the healthy cells.‎

He further plans to insert the nuclei into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will ‎then become the surrogate mother of the mammoth. It may well take over two years ‎before reaching the stage of impregnating the elephant. The gestation period is about 600-‎days. With improvement in cloning cattle being successful up-to 30%, the chances of obtaining a cloned ‎mammoth looks bright in the coming four to five years.‎