Ancient coral yields DNA that can unlock clues about global warming

[jpak]

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/sciencemedicine/story/AAA7D14508171A45862575140006095A?OpenDocument

The skeletons in the Earth's closet reveal not only a dark past. They also cast a light on its future.

That is what Tim Shank discovered when he sent an underwater robot to sweep up a basket full of broccoli-like fossils from volcanoes under the sea. Shank, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found skeletons of 35,000- to 40,000-year-old corals littered on the New England Seamounts in the North Atlantic. He took them back to his laboratory, extracted what he could of their remaining DNA fragments, and started to piece together their past.

Their story - and similar ones gleaned from the DNA of ancient spiders entombed in ice cores, and the bones of dodos and woolly mammoths - tells us how ancient creatures survived or disappeared as a result of dramatic climate changes. That, in turn, provides a preview of how today's flora and fauna might react to global warming.

These kind of "ancient DNA" studies have become possible in the past few years, and from them researchers have been able to piece together not just when and where long-gone plants and animals lived, but how species adapted, migrated, or perished during periods of melting glaciers and warming temperatures. When scientists recently announced that they had decoded most of the woolly mammoth's genome, it was another sign of dramatic progress in sequencing the DNA of extinct and dead organisms.

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