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WHAT IS CLONING? Dolly the sheep was duplicated by cloning. "Clones are organisms that are exact genetic copies. Every single bit of their DNA is identical. Clones can happen naturally—identical twins are just one of many examples. Or they can be made in the lab." A useful cloning primer. http://lnkd.in/dbFGugN View in LinkedIn

CHURCH ON DE-EXTINCTION. "DNA can now be precisely spliced into and out of a complete genome. Find the genes that make a mammoth different from an elephant ... splice it in and, voila, a new kind of mammoth. “We can make a hybrid elephant with the best features of modern elephants and mammoths." http://lnkd.in/dYTym8q View in LinkedIn

ANCIENT DNA CONTAMINATION RISK. "Because aDNA is often damaged and found in low concentrations, it is crucial that lab work ... is conducted in sterile conditions (and) ...to test whether they are being contaminated by modern DNA ... aDNA sequence data need to pass basic authenticity tests: they must make evolutionary and biochemical sense, and be reproducible." http://lnkd.in/dfDcYEx View in LinkedIn

HOW LONG CAN ANCIENT DNA SURVIVE? "In theory, retrievable aDNA could survive for up to 1 million years under ideal conditions. In practice, however, the oldest recovered aDNA is from the early Middle Pleistocene epoch ... (up to ~780,000 years old) and from sediment that originated below the Greenland ice sheet (up to ~800,000 years old)." http://lnkd.in/dfDcYEx View in LinkedIn

RECOVERY OF EXTINCT SPECIES. "De-extinction, resurrection biology, or species revivalism is the controversial process of creating an organism, which is a member of or resembles an extinct species, or a breeding population of such organisms. Cloning is the most widely proposed method, although selective breeding has also been proposed." http://lnkd.in/dFz2nP7 View in LinkedIn

SPECIES REGENESIS VERSUS ARCHIVAL CONSERVATION. The biological tools are largely at hand today, with some luck and hard work, to revive most of the many species where DNA has been recovered intact and sequenced. This topic has generated a lively debate. View in LinkedIn

BIG SAMPLE BANKS. "San Diego Zoo ... has an extensive database of animal genomes, a "seed bank," and a "frozen zoo" of cell cultures from more than 9,000 animals; the University of California, Santa Cruz, with the world's most extensive online database of genomes; and the U.S. Department of Energy, with an online database." http://lnkd.in/dtVxkW6 View in LinkedIn

THE BARCODING CHINESE PLANTS PROJECT (2009) "with the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (GBOWS) ... 60 research groups from 22 research institutes and universities to evaluate the candidate barcode markers, and to barcode around 6,000 species of plants in China, including the seed collection within the GBOWS facility." http://lnkd.in/dB3GikU View in LinkedIn

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE to document the DNA of 1.3 million species. "The plan is to eventually freeze embryos, seeds, and other genetic samples from as many of Earth's life-forms as possible ... (At the) Smithsonian Institute's biorepository ... that has space for more than 4.2 million tiny vials of cryogenically frozen tissue samples." http://lnkd.in/dtVxkW6 View in LinkedIn

GLOBAL GENOME INITIATIVE by the Smithsonian Institute "recently started a project akin to the Norwegian Barcode of Life network, a plan to sequence the DNA of each and every one of Earth’s identified species ... called the Global Genome Initiative." http://lnkd.in/dkEu_8K View in LinkedIn