A 52,000 year old mammoth, very closely associated with Cadiz.

When the woolly mammoth, the protagonist of this story, died of hunger, cold or some disease in Siberia 52,000 years ago, the city of Cadiz was still 49,000 years away from being founded. and the beginning of social development in the Gulf. No one could have imagined then, least of all the mammoth, that between a dead animal and the Gulf of Cadiz in the 21st century a family connection would arise.

The discovery of the animal is important, lor even more so because an international team led by scientists from the National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) has discovered fossils of ancient chromosomes in the remains of a woolly mammoth. Trapped in Siberia’s permafrost for 52,000 years, he managed to assemble the genome of an extinct species for the first time.

The study, published in the scientific journal Cell nine years after its launch, was conducted by more than 50 scientists from teams at CNAG and the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, ​​Baylor College of Medicine (USA) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

The study represents a before and after look at these species and their ability to adapt to the climatic adversities of their time.

According to study co-author Olga Dudchenko, the survival of these fragments of ancient DNA for tens of millennia is a “mystery of physics” because, as Albert Einstein predicted in 1905, they should not exist under normal circumstances.

He Swedish researcher Love Dalen has discovered the remains of a female woolly mammoth.locked in frozen ground for 52,000 years. “I’ve found many hundreds of mammoth specimens in my career, but this one is extremely well preserved. It’s probably the best preserved mammoth specimen I’ve found,” Dalen explains to the journalist. A country.

well thenThis researcher is from Stockholm University You could say he’s half Cadiz because of his his wife is from El Puerto de Santa Maria, and his daughter was born in Jerez.. More than a close connection with our land, which indicates that he lived there for some time. it’s the sameGreat-grandson Gustav Dalen, winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of an automatic regulator to reduce the gas consumption of coastal lighthouses guiding ships.

Creation of fossil chromosomes

Researchers believe that the permafrost (permafrost) in which the mammoth was found in Siberia led to the creation of fossil chromosomes through a process similar to the production of dried meat or jerky.

For this reason, having been preserved in a state similar to glass molecules, the structure of the chromosome has been preserved to this day.

Phenomenon of chromosome compartmentalization present in skin sample mammothseparates active and inactive DNA into adjacent spaces within the cell’s nucleus, and this is what allowed the researchers to determine which genes were active at the time of the animal’s death.

Comparing the genome (the complete set of DNA) of the mammoth and its closest living relative, the elephant, they found many similarities, but were not completely identical.

In particular, they found about 1,000 regions with differential activity in the genome; for example, a growth gene, an immune adaptation gene, and a cold adaptation gene.

“With this type of data, we not only know which genes the mammoth has versus the elephant, but also which ones helped it adapt and can explain why it went extinct,” whether due to climate change or an inability to adapt to other phenomena, says CNAG team leader and co-lead author of the study Marc Marty-Renom.

A Milestone in Paleogenomics

The scientists say the discovery opens the door to working with other types of specimens in the future, particularly from natural history museums, where there are many specimens preserved in the same way as the animal analyzed, as well as endangered specimens and even dried mummies.

“We can now study the ancient specimen and its gene activity, which shows how it adapted to the environment at the time,” adds the CNAG researcher.

For her part, Marcela Sandoval-Velasco, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Evolutionary Hologenomics and another co-author of the paper, considers it “a milestone in the field of paleogenomics.”

“We’re taking a step forward in studying the past,” says Sandoval, who argues that these small fragments of ancient DNA “speak to us and allow us to study the evolutionary history of different organisms.”

But experts are not just looking back, but also seeing the discovery as an opportunity to answer questions about how changes in biodiversity – as a result of climate change – might affect our own existence on the planet.

“Having this type of molecular material from 52,000 years ago, when our planet’s climate was very different, can help us make correlations between our past, our present, and our future,” said Baylor College of Medicine researcher and study co-author Cynthia Perez.