Extinct Tasmanian Tiger's DNA sequenced

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa., Jan. 13 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists who sequenced woolly mammoth DNA, opening the prospect of regenerating the extinct species, say they've now sequenced a Tasmanian Tiger's DNA.

Their work, published Thursday in the journal Genome Research, marks the first successful sequencing of genes from this carnivorous marsupial, which looked like a large tiger-striped dog and became extinct in 1936, the Pennsylvania State University molecular biologists and biochemists said.

The extracted DNA came from two extinct specimens' hair, rather than bone, the researchers said.

Hair is a powerful time capsule for preserving DNA over centuries and under a wide range of conditions, they said.

DNA is an extremely long "macromolecule" that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms.

The specimens came from Washington's Smithsonian Museum and Stockholm's Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The researchers extracted DNA from small amounts of the hair of each specimen, then used methods they developed to sequence independent copies of each region of the DNA molecule from many different fragments of DNA in the hairs, they said.

The scientists assured accuracy of their results by independently determining each position in the sequences an average of 50 times, they said.

Schuster and his colleagues reported in November they had completed a genome-wide sequence of the woolly mammoth from clumps of hair from the ice-age elephant relatives.

At the time, scientists speculated the same technology could be applied to other species that went extinct within the past 60,000 years, DNA's effective age limit.