Scientists hope to help Asian elephants fight climate change using woolly mammoth genes

• Scientists are trying to reengineer Asian elephant DNA using preserved woolly-mammoth genes.
  
• The woolly mammoths could survive in severe cold.
  
• If successful, this gene-editing technique will increase Asian elephants’ chances of survival.
  

Have you seen how artists, with the help of scientists, have imagined the woolly mammoths? If not, sample this.



These giants used to walk the Earth some 4,000 years ago and could tolerate extreme cold. Some scientists are attempting to rescue the Asian elephants from premature extinction using permafrost-preserved DNA of the woolly mammoth.

Scientists are planning to make an elephant hybrid, one that will be very similar to Asian elephants but with an ability to withstand colder temperatures. This, scientists hope, would give the endangered species a chance at survival.

The process of developing the elephant hybrid -- the elephant-mammoth -- will be long and gradual. The preserved DNA of the woolly mammoth will be used and from this, the genes that give the animal the ability to resist severe cold temperature will be extracted and fused with the genes of the Asian elephant. The scientists would let the embryo grow inside a lab in an artificial womb.

The woolly mammoths that lived in northern parts of the globe, called the mammoth steppe, kept the ground cool by knocking down trees. These behemoth creatures helped the grass grow to reflect the sunlight in summers in turn maintaining a cooler temperature of soil and a rich ecosystem.

The Asian elephants will not be able to survive the results of the changing environment in the Arctic, scientists said. If the scientists succeed at using gene-editing techniques like Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) to introduce the woolly-mammoth gene to Asian elephant cells and manage to create elephant-mammoth hybrids, these would be able to survive steppe-like cold.

George Church, a Harvard and MIT geneticist leading the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, said that just 44 genes from the mammoth might be sufficient to help the endangered species adapt. As of now, the Earth has an estimated population of 35,000 to 40,000 Asian elephants.