Beef jerky and some woolly mammoths have at least one thing in common: Drying turns their DNA into super-tough glass.
This glassy DNA is so stable that it preserved the three-dimensional structure of chromosomes in one woolly mammoth for 52,000 years, researchers report July 11 in Cell. The find gave researchers an unprecedented look at the extinct animal’s genetic instruction book, or genome, even revealing genes that were turned on and off before the mammoth died, says genomicist and neuroscientist Cynthia Pérez Estrada. If other well-preserved samples can be found, glimpses at gene activity may help scientists understand how extinct organisms functioned, not just how they looked.