Scientists' attempt to bring the woolly mammoth back to life by creating "woolly mice"

According to a US-based bioscience company, "woolly mice" have been created in an attempt to revive woolly mammoths. Through genetic engineering, these mice have developed a number of mammoth-like characteristics, including thick, wavy, and golden coats, that are geared toward cold tolerance. Seven genes have been successfully edited by Colossal Biosciences scientists to show that they result in the desired colwd resistance traits.

By incorporating several cold-tolerant characteristics from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we have demonstrated our capacity to replicate intricate genetic patterns that took millions of years for nature to produce. We are one step closer to our objective of reviving the woolly mammoth thanks to this success," Colossal Biosciences CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm stated in a press release.

Notably, some experts who were not part of the project questioned the purpose of producing woolly mice. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany's Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer, told Nature, "It's not even close to creating a mammoth or a'mammoth mouse.'" It's just a mouse with special genes.

The FGF5 gene, which targets the hair development cycle, has been edited by the scientists to produce longer, shaggy hair. Because of this, the woolly mice's hair grew three times longer than that of the wild type mice. The researchers also changed three other genes related to hair follicle growth and structure to produce woolly hair texture, wavy coats, and curled whiskers.

One of the other targeted genes, MC1R, recreated the golden coat of the woolly mammoth rather than the black coat of the wild mice. The FABP2 gene, which is connected to the fatty acid absorption and lipid metabolism of the woolly mammoth, is also truncated in the woolly mouse. As a result, the mice's body weight varies.

Why have some scientists expressed reservations about the study?

The Colossal Biosciences scientists made eight alterations to an organism's genome, which is quite usual in genetic engineering, Riesenberg told Nature.

Researchers have also identified certain mistakes in the unpublished Colossal Biosciences study, including Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in London.