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.
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,
The journal Cell on Friday published the Stockholm University research team’s study regarding the successful RNA extraction.
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 reported.
“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.
“It’s so amazingly surprising to find RNA that is 40,000 years old,” he said. “Nobody really thought this was possible.”
RNA is short for ribonucleic acid and is a molecule that converts genes into proteins.
RNA normally degrades quickly, but permafrost preserved it in the young woolly mammoth, which Russian scientists think is a female and named it Yuka.
“It felt like a very high-risk project,” Stockholm University paleontologist Love Dalen told NPR. “It seemed like a completely crazy thing to try to do.”
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.
The scientists removed RNA samples from the young mammoth and several others, three of which proved to be useful, including the sample from Yuka.
“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.”
The scientists also identified new types of microRNA, which control how information contained within genes is used to create something more useful, such as a protein.
Studying ancient RNA would help scientists to better understand the origins and history of RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, Ebola and others, according to the study.