German scientists said in Nature, the British science journal, that they had reconstructed a key sequence in the genome of the woolly mammoth. With this sequence it is possible to show that the closest modern relative to the woolly mammoth is the Asian elephant.
The scientists used a new method called multiplex polymerase chain reaction. The method was used on 200 milligrams of bone extracted from a mammoths’ graveyard in the Siberian permafrost. With this method the scientists copied 46 chunks of sequence, rearranged them and could then get a picture mitochondrial DNA.