Reacción a "Mice with fur reminiscent of extinct woolly mammoth created"

Genetic engineering in mice has been performed for a very long time using, developing, and testing a variety of technologies. These modifications include introducing traits from other species, notoriously ‘humanised mice’ that have been used for research related to human traits and disease.

The decoding of an extinct species genome to identify specific genes associated with particular traits has also been done before, where the physical characteristics of ancient humans have been deduced from their genomic data. 

Perhaps the novelty here is using mice to confirm the assumptions about correlations between genes and specific traits. The press release gives the impression that mammoth genes were introduced to mice but from the preprint, it transpires that the genomic editing in these mice consists of inducing loss of function of several genes simultaneously. The choice of these genes comes from observed spontaneous mutations in mice that impact traits such as coat and comparative analyses of elephant and mammoth genomes that reveal similar loss of function in some of these genes.

The ability to use mice in order to examine and test gene-trait relationships and hypotheses about physical characteristics specifically using genomes from extinct organisms might prove useful, but overall not particularly novel.