Mammoth's Genome Pieced Together
Sequencing the Nuclear Genome of the Extinct Woolly Mammoth
For my media report project, I compared the news article/press release “Mammoth’s Genome Pieced Together” from BBC News to the journal article “Sequencing the Nuclear Genome of the Extinct Wooly Mammoth” from Nature Journal. The article from BBC News was written to summarize the findings from the article that was published in the Nature Journal.
From information that was directly taken from the original journal article, the BBC article claimed that the recreated genome is about 80% complete, the mammoth and African elephant genome just differ by 0.6%, which is about half the difference between the human and chimpanzee genome, and the study can help reveal genetic factors that affect extinction. Another claim the BBC News accurately reported was that extracted DNA samples from mammoth hair worked a lot better in this research than extracted DNA samples from bone tissue because hair isn’t swamped with as much DNA from fungi and bacteria.
The BBC News though did make “inferred” claims in their article because some things that they stated weren’t in the original paper. The Nature Journal doesn’t ever specifically say that cloning a long-dead species could be possible, or that this research can help in protecting other animals against extinction like the BBC News did.
Another difference between the journal and the BBC News are the conclusions discussed. BBC News brings up cloning and the thought of resurrecting the mammoth when that isn’t even the idea that the original paper was getting at. In the journal, it states that, “A major reason for sequencing the wooly mammoth is to identify functionally important amino-acid differences between mammoth and elephant,” and the researchers concluded that, “a high-fidelity, high-coverage mammoth genome will be feasible once the genome sequence for the African elephant has been completed and 10-30-fold more mammoth sequence has been generated.” I assume that these major points weren’t put in the BBC News article because they probably don’t interest the average non-scientific reader, but cloning definitely does.
The BBC News article also doesn’t describe any uncertainties that the researchers had in their results. The original article states that the 80% completion of the genome is, “just a rough estimate, but it is consistent with a genome size of 4.7 Gb.”Also, the researchers took into account the overlapping reads of the genome sequence when calculating that percentage. The way BBC News describes the findings makes it seems as if they’re 100% accurate.
One thing that the BBC News described well though is how this new research extracted DNA from hair than from the normal bone tissue. This research wasn’t meant to refute any findings from the past, but the journal article did discuss how the use of hair to get DNA was a lot better than trying to use bone tissue, as most researchers have done in the past. The BBC article briefly discussed that aspect.
It seems as if the BBC News article really tried to glamorize the work that was done on sequencing the mammoth genome. The findings from this research are very important, but the BBC didn’t really explain the real goals the researchers were trying to realize. By talking about cloning/resurrecting the wooly mammoth in the opening paragraphs of their news article, the BBC is obviously just trying to appeal to a normal reader’s interests. Cloning is a broader implication that was made by the news article, but it definitely wasn’t discussed in the original journal article. I understand why questions about cloning can be raised based on the information discovered through this genome research, but the BBC News article just seemed like a glamorization of the real facts and objectives of the original research.