Drvmb1ggl3, I stand corrected. Thank you!
I agree with you, S. What did those horses look like, how were they “put together”, what kind of temperament did they have (fiesty and hard to handle or brutish and determined?). In those old paintings the horses all looked very, very similar and as you said, tiny legs with big bodies and kinda ugly heads.
[QUOTE=ellevt;7560824]
BEVA put that article up about cloning eclipse on April 1st… I think it was just an April Fool’s joke that got passed around as fact[/QUOTE]
Perhaps, but I doubt it. Eclipse’s DNA has been under scrutiny for most of the past decade, beginning with samples from his skeleton. Apparently, it also required a hair (root) sample from “The Whip” to assemble a full nuclear genome.
The point in doing this is almost certainly not to register, much less race, a clone of Eclipse. More likely, it’s just a starting point in studying, among other things, the effect of 200+ years of heavy artificial selection pressure on the TB genome, though it must be noted that it isn’t necessary to grow out a clone to study a genome. Eclipse is not the only historic TB whose remains are available for this type of analysis which could yield information useful for improving health and fitness of the modern TB.
I sincerely doubt that DNA isolated from 200+ year old hair would be intact enough to even create a viable zygote.
Yes old DNA gets isolated all the time, but for sequencing (which involves breaking it into little chunks anyway)
One advantage of studying the TB population is that there is good, consistent breeding data going back for more than 200 years, which is a treasure trove for anyone working on the TB/horse genome. With computers, who needs a living clone?
Curiously enough, when staff at the Royal Vet College, London, started to develop a computer programme for equine gait analysis, they used the best measurements of a horse they could find. They used Eclipse, who was very carefully dissected in the 18th Century with the results published, and, by good luck, the measurements could be checked against the actual skeleton of the horse, which is in the college museum. So Eclipse was at the foundation of modern gait analysis.
I find this extremely fascinating. I think, if it does happen, it could be a huge eye opener. Were they harder on their horses then? Simply bred to be better? Do we baby our horses too much, not enough?
Hands down, if I had oodles of spare change, I would clone Ruffian and breed her to a stud with significant leg bone. Even if not for racing, that kind of heart could surely be passed on elsewhere.
[QUOTE=ellevt;7586097]
I sincerely doubt that DNA isolated from 200+ year old hair would be intact enough to even create a viable zygote. [/QUOTE]
From hair & skeletal samples combined they might be able to get pretty close. They can always use fresh donor material to fill in any missing/damaged strands and still reasonably call it a clone as long as the donor doesn’t account for any significant percentage of the part of the genome that varies within the species.
There’s good reason to try to assemble a full genome from Eclipse but, again, no need to grow out a clone to do it. I sincerely hope the report that they’re attempting to do so was indeed a bit of April Fool mischief but that strikes me as out of character for BEVA.
That’s not really how cloning works. DNA isn’t like text that you can just copy and paste. A clone needs full intact chromosomes to be viable, especially the telomeres, which considering Eclipse’s age at death and the age of the sample, would be quite degraded.
With sequencing, yes, you can use an existing template to fill in the gaps. But those are just letters on a computer screen. It’s a very different bear than the actual molecules in vivo.
