In some other Wooly Mammoth threads floating around this forum, a theory has been put forward that if the sperm from a frozen mammoth was implanted in to an elephant, the resulting ‘new born’ would be 50% elephant / 50% mammoth.
If they implanted THAT animal with mammoth sperm, you would get something that is 25% Elephant / 75% mammoth.
It then goes on to say that eventually would have the ratio at 0.1/99.9.
I don’t know much about DNA, but isn’t the genetic make up of an animal determined by the chromosomes?
Let’s say the first new born “elephant mammoth” got half it’s chromosomes from the elephant, and the other half from the mammoth.
Next new born gets 75% mammoth chromosomes/25% elephant chromosomes.
Eventually, wouldn’t you have all chromosomes coming from the wooly mammoth’s side of the family? Making the animal 100% mammoth? And not 99.9% mammoth?
I mean, when it comes down to one last chromosome that will either be mammoth or elephant, and all other chromosomes are mammoth, and this last chromosome is mammoth, then, wouldn’t you have a… mammoth?
If anyone can make sense of all that, your input would be appreciated.
It’s not a simple as if an animal had 2 sets of chromosomes and that the chromosomes are passed on whole to the next generation. The DNA mixes in whats called meiosis which is the process which makes eggs and sperm. Normal cell division is Mitosis where a cell splits and the 2 new cells have identical DNA. Meiosis results in a cell splitting into 4 new cells each with one set of chromosomes. But during meiosis, the strands of DNA from the chromosomes intertwine and swap some DNA. This means that If you had a Wollie Mamoth with one Mamoth cromosome and one Elephant one, the resulting chromosome in the sperm or egg would not be either totaly elephant or mamoth, but a mix of both. didn’t really explain that well, but I can’t find anything on the net about it that would explain it better.
I think what you’re thinking is that eventually you’d get an animal with all mammoth chromosomes except one elephant chromosome. The next step would then be a purely mammoth animal. This makes sense, except for one thing. Chromosomes don’t actually get inherited as units. Crossing over is a very significant event. Homologous chromosomes cross over and mix their genes a lot during meiosis. So it is more complicated that you’d first expect.