article_snippet.sent: The study has also raised the prospect of bringing the giant mammal back to life using cloning techniques with modern elephants.
article_snippet.sent: Scientists claim to have taken a major step towards recreating the woolly mammoth by inserting more than a dozen of the creature's genes into the live DNA of an elephant.
article_snippet.sent: exact copies of 14 of the extinct animal’s genes were then integrated by experts at Harvard University in Massachusetts into the elephant genome - and functioned as normal DNA.
article_snippet.sent: A new method known as 'Crispr' - helping scientists make accurate changes to DNA - was used by genetics professor George Church, who replaced parts of elephant DNA with the mammoth genes .
article_snippet.sent: Other researchers have proposed using mammoth DNA to replace that of an elephant using a similar technique to the one used to clone Dolly the Sheep.
article_snippet.sent: The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Cell Biology, found that the mammoth genome only appeared to align with African elephant DNA by between 64 per cent and 76 per cent.
article_snippet.sent: Professor Poinar, said The new results raises the prospect that mammoths could now be brought back from extinction.
article_snippet.sent: Organisations like the Long Now Foundation have said Organisations like the Long Now Foundation hope to resurrect mammoth.
article_snippet.sent: Professor Poinar said: ‘This discovery means that recreating extinct species is a much more real possibility, one Organisations like the Long Now Foundation could in theory realize within decades.
article_snippet.sent: With a complete genome and this kind of data, we can now begin to understand what made a mammoth a mammoth—when compared to an elephant—and some of the underlying causes of their extinction which is an exceptionally difficult and complex puzzle to solve.
highlights_snippet.sent: DNA sequencing also raises prospect of bringing mammoths back to life .