It’s not just straight math. With 99% homology to chimpanzees, it is the differences that make us human. Could we make 20 or so changes to the chimpanzee genome and create a human? No. But, could we create a tall, hairless chimp, with low muscle tone? Yeah, I think we could.
As I said in my initial post, this is a headline grabbing experiment designed to source additional funding for the underlying research.
To the second question, scientists might be able to “restomod” ancient extinct species. Or, create chimeras with the physical characteristics of extinct species. Recently extinct species, where actual preserved tissue is available, might be able to be resurrected, but this tech does nothing for the underlying issues that cause extinctions (habitat loss, poaching, lack of genetic diversity, etc).
Sorry, no one’s going to ever see a herd of wooly mammoths roaming the steppes. Even if they can be resurrected, there’s just no place for them.
(As far as biological molecules go, DNA is pretty stable. But, it’s not that stable. A really good, fresh, DNA sample will have an average molecule length of greater than 50,000 base pairs. Samples that have been handled a bit, thawed a couple of times, and generally not been treated with kid gloves will have average molecule lengths from a few thousand up to about 20,000 base pairs in length, in my experience. “Ancient DNA,” where it can be sourced, will tend to have molecule lengths of just a few hundred base pairs. Why does this matter?
The shortest human chromosome has a length of about 48 million base pairs. And, genes are not placed “Willy nilly” on chromosomes. They have regulatory elements, transcription factors, elements that control RNA splicing, pseudo genes, duplications, etc. “Where” on the chromosome is almost as important as “what.”)
While the researchers might have been able to “sequence” the dire wolf genome, “assembly” is the real kicker. Their “genome map” is broken into thousands (tens of thousands?) of pieces, and contains gaps of missing data. They can use genomes of extant species {like the grey wolf} to infer how to piece together the dire wolf genome, but it’s an educated guess. If a grey wolf genome map exists, it is certainly fragmented into thousands of pieces itself…
As a further aside, the most contiguous human genome to date (the most studied species on earth) is fragmented into roughly 800 pieces. That’s about 40x more than the 23 chromosomes that we have.
www.westernjournal.com
