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* Woolly mammoths are closer to Asian than African elephants - Nature
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[1] Woolly mammoths are closer to Asian than African elephants
DOI: 10.1038/04432
Using a new technique, geneticists have reached into the past to reconstruct
the genetic sequence of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). The
feat, published online by Nature, allows them to compare the extinct beast's
DNA to that of the two existing elephant species, and to show that the
mammoth was more closely related to Asian elephants.
The researchers, led by Michael Hofreiter, took just 200 milligrams of
mammoth bone, extracted the DNA from it and subjected it to a new process
called 'multiplex polymerase chain reaction', in which a range of different
templates are used to copy 46 separate chunks of sequence. These chunks are
then arranged in order, giving a complete record of the mammoth's
mitochondrial DNA - a sequence of some 5,000 DNA letters useful for
comparing the evolutionary relationships between different species.
Hofreiter's team compared the mammoth DNA to that of today's elephants, and
found that the Asian elephant emerges as the closer sister species, although
not by much. It seems that African elephants branched off some six million
years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging just 440,000 years
later - a strikingly similar family tree to that of gorillas, chimpanzees
and humans.
Author contact:
Michael Hofreiter (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Leipzig, Germany)
Tel: +49 341 355 0523, E-mail: [email protected]
Other papers from Nature to be published online at the same time and with
the same embargo:
[2] Histone demethylation by a family of JmjC domain-containing proteins
DOI: 10.1038/nature04433
[3] Chromatin organization and cell fate switch respond to positional
information in Arabidopsis
DOI: 10.1038/nature04269
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