Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!jif!boyle
From: boyle@jif.berkeley.edu (joseph boyle)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Mammoth clones
Message-ID: <12860@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 2 Aug 88 02:18:42 GMT
References: <201200013@prism> <1364@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <2887@calmasd.GE.COM> <4786@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: boyle@jif.UUCP (joseph boyle)
Organization: Math Dept., UC Berkeley
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In article <4786@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> jyamato@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (YAMATO JON AYAO) writes:
>I don't know about this one, but two gene sequences were isolated from
>the hide of a preserved museum quagga (a recently extinct zebra-like
>animal) by similar techniques.  However, with maybe 500,000 genes in
>a higher organism (plus all the non-DNA information in the cell) this
>is a long way from being able to reconsititute the quagga...

>The new Polymerase Chain Reaction DNA-amplification method is supposed
>to be powerful enough to produce useful quantities of DNA from a single
>hair, so this kind of trick may become more common in the future.  The
>limiting problem, I think, is fragmentation of the DNA--if your sample
>does not contain at least one intact copy of the desired gene you're
>out of luck.  Also, PCR requires that you know what you're looking
>for.
    Mary Kuhner

PCR uses primers specific to the sequence you want to amplify so the
sequence can be distinguished from background noise.  It should be as
possible to take a single unknown piece of DNA and amplify it, if it
is the only original DNA sequence in the reaction cell.  So the DNA
fragments from the quagga or mammoth or whatever could be diluted and
split up so that each sample was only likely to contain one fragment,
then amplified separately.

Having the fragments is one thing, but putting them together is another.
Overlap would give some clues, although maybe not enough.  If not, could
intact DNA from a similar existing species be used as a (partial) template?