Not a dumb question. No, we can't clone it. It will be an incomplete genome, it's just a subset of the animal's entire DNA sequence, and it's reconstructed from proteins. We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.
> We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.
If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?
To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?
Consider the size of the DNA "books": for example, the human genome is around 3 GB (uncompressed), much bigger than a single book on your shelf: King James Bible as plain text is around 4 MB (uncompressed), so it's a factor of roughly 1000 times (being always copied in every cell of your body!) and we have many complete copies and versions of older bibles but we still can't completely reconstruct too old versions. But we can have a reasonable reconstruction of the "tree" of the development of the known bibles.
And having just a single page from a bible can tell you quite good where that bible fits in the tree of all known bibles.
We can look at the genomes of things alive today. They can be measured and compared, from these comparisons we can make educated guesses of what the genome of the long gone last common ancestor of closely related species might have looked like. With theories of "molecular clocks" (rates of ambient mutations) we can make guesses at how much time is needed to explain different amounts of change in genomes.
Here getting actual data from an ancient source beyond being interesting in its own right for rino lovers around the globe provides a reality check on the processes used for phylogenetic inferences across the tree of life
Scientist's things. Increasing knowledge, conservation of extant species of endangered rhinos, understanding how Europe lost half of this big mammals fauna... Things like that.
An antiweather sweater made of wool of european woolly rhino looks badass on the other hand. If they have it in orange, I want one.
This is very interesting... IIRC previous estimates were about 1m years before DNA degraded too much to extract useful information. This seems to push that back a little bit.
Still, a Jurassic Park scenario is impossible. Even deeply frozen DNA isn’t stable over millions of years.
No, this doesn't push it back because this isn't DNA, it's genetic information but the information is recovered by decoding the proteins found in the enamel to generate the DNA/RNA string that produced them. It's kind of like making a mold from an existing widget when the original mold is gone.
I usually welcome editing the title to be in accordance with the guidelines but tbh you guys went a bit overboard on this one. Previous version of the title clearly indicated that it is about a tooth or an ancient rhinoceros, but “enamel from Stephanorhinus”? Not very helpful.
Side note: When looking for HN posts, I tend to enjoy the ones where I know <4 words in the title.
DNA has always been such a fascinating topic to me. In school, we had such a limited look into it and yet it seemed to be the thing in what makes us "us". I really hope as a society we continue to push the boundaries of our knowledge to see what DNA can tell us. And out of teeth? That is just so awesome.
For others who are having trouble understating the title, it basically translates as: "Set of proteins in bit of tooth from very old rhino from Georgia (the Caucuses) enables genetic classification of some related species."
DNA doesn’t survive that long. In this case they recovered the sequence of amino acids in proteins from the now-extinct rhino. Of course, the proteins were originally transcribed from the now-lost DNA, so you can use this information to infer this species position in the tree of life.
No way, this title is perfect HackerNews clickbait. I was baited, and I was not disappointed by the article. Or at least the abstract, which was as far as I got. TLDR: They figured out how to use tooth enable to make genetic associations between fossils, and learn some other things. And it's a lot more reliable for old fossils than DNA!
Edit: Title at the time of writing my comment is "Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny" which is the actual title from the article
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7285683/ns/technology_and_science-...
Was it delicious? Also, was there any DNA recoverable through this newer method?