Re: OT: scientists recreate mouse from gene older than animal life

Nov 19, 2024 Last reply: 1 year ago 2 Replies


Scientists recreate mouse from gene older than animal life


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New research sheds light on evolutionary origins of stem cells with groundbreaking experiment to create mouse using ancient genetic tools

It is probably not a coincidence that the single celled creature they used for this was an ancient flagellate. They were the first living things to actually have a viable protein motor of sorts and a whip tail which gave them their name.


Last common ancestor still with genes close enough to work in a mammal.


There may well be fungi or slime moulds similarly capable of this trick.

The article title is, if not actually misleading, inclined to mislead.

An uninitiated reader might construe this as meaning that the researchers more or less created a mouse from scratch. But it's clear that that's not what happened. Rather, they've taken a non-stem cell from a mouse and created a mouse stem cell from it.

Sylvia.

I chased down the underlying article, which was unlocked for all. The article made sense. I think the problem with the Science Daily article is that the writer had no idea what they were looking at.

What was done is that an ancient functional piece was installed in a modern mouse egg replacing the modern descendent of that piece, and it still worked normally in the resulting mouse pup. This piece is quite ancient, and yet has remained essentially unchanged to this day.

Joe Gwinn

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