This video is about Tyrannosaurus rex protein research.
Mastodon DNA sequenced
Ancient tooth reveals elephants’ family tree.
The mastodon, an extinct relative of modern elephants, has become the latest prehistoric animal to have its DNA sequenced.
Using a fossilized tooth, Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues sequenced all the DNA of the mastodon’s mitochondrion, an energy-generating structure in the cell with its own small genome.
The tooth is believed to be 50,000-130,000 years old, making the mastodon’s the oldest complete mitochondrial genome decoded so far.
“This extremely old and complete sequence is of interest in its own right,” says Hofreiter. But it can also help to resolve debates about the ancestry of modern elephants.
Scientists have been unable to agree how the Asian elephants, African elephants and woolly mammoths are related. The problem is that elephants have no living close kin — their nearest relatives are the ocean-going dugong and the rodent-like hyrax.
But a family tree based on the DNA of elephants, mammoth and mastodon shows that Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than they are to African elephants. The results are reported in PloS Biology.
Naked mole rat genome sequenced: San Antonio colony of long-lived rodents contributes to study: here.
Naked Mole Rat Genome May Hold Key to Long Life: here.