Not good news for the mammoth cloners

A "junk DNA" study suggests that one of the functions has to do with identifying DNA belonging to "me"--this species--to keep it from being discarded ("chromosomes scatter and start to leak out of the cell’s nucleus.") That seems like a possible defense against viruses.

I complained before that the host egg cell wouldn't have perfectly matching RNA and that that probably would cause failures to express the DNA correctly. If this study is correct, cross-species cloning faces an additional problem.

I don't quite see how the claim about germline cells (at least as the article purports to explain it) makes sense. Perhaps they mean that for meiosis, one of the daughter cells is sacrificed to give the other the full complement of the required sequences needed to keep it "young". If that happened every time, I don't see how the germline cells would reproduce. You'd get a fixed number and a division would produce another and a not-quite, keeping the count of good ones the same. The article didn't have a link to the paper.