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Steppe mammoth (illustration): "At the beginning we thought this investigation was a stupid idea"
Photo: Beth Zaiken / Center for Palaeogen / action press
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Dalén, your team broke a record.
You have analyzed DNA that is more than a million years old.
The oldest genetic material to date was 500,000 years younger.
Were you surprised yourself that such a jump is possible?
Love Dalén:
At the beginning we thought this investigation was a stupid idea.
I had known about these mammoth teeth for a long time, they were found back in the 1970s.
We had already tried the analysis in 2008, but it didn't work at the time.
But a lot has happened since then, and so we started again.
SPIEGEL:
Why did it work this time?
Dalén:
There has been a real revolution in sequencing technology over the past decade.
Just one example: in the first attempt we identified 100 sequences in one go, today we can manage 3 billion.
That’s a huge difference.
SPIEGEL:
How important are faster computers in this context?
Dalén:
A lot of computing power is very important to solve the genetic puzzle.
As a result of the aging process, the DNA was broken up into small pieces so that it contains many tiny, similar-looking snippets.
On the other hand, the samples were contaminated with the genetic material of bacteria, plants and humans, including laboratory staff.
In the two oldest finds, the proportion of mammoth DNA was no more than one percent, the rest was contamination.
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