Pask believes the thylacine is one of the best candidates for de-extinction efforts because there are sound ecological reasons for bringing it back. This is about playing smart human to redress the times when we inappropriately played God by exterminating things #Mike the tiger video ambush predator how to#How to bring species back from the dead is one question whether we should is another. Though the project has successfully produced early-stage embryos, no clones so far have survived to tadpoles or adult frogs. The last known specimen of the frog, which was native to Queensland, died in 1983, but the team have some well-preserved tissues. The aptly named Lazarus project, led by Prof Mike Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, is taking a similar approach to try to bring back the southern gastric-brooding frog. Photograph: University of Western Australia The team successfully cloned Celia, reviving the subspecies from extinction for several minutes, before the newborn animal died of a lung defect.Ī numbat, an endangered termite-eating marsupial which shares 95% of its DNA with the thylacine. In 2003, researchers cloned a Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of the Iberian wild goat that went extinct when Celia, the last living individual, was killed by a falling tree. Scientists have already used the technique successfully, although the triumph was short-lived. It relies on intact cells from the extinct species, so is only practical when the last animal has recently died – which effectively rules the method out for thylacines. The process involves taking a nucleus – the structure containing the genome – from the cell of an extinct animal and inserting it into an egg of a living relative species, which has had its own nucleus removed. Pask adds: “We then need to be able to turn a marsupial DNA-containing cell into a living marsupial, and we don’t have that technology developed yet either.” Short-lived de-extinction successĪnother way to bring a species back from the dead is to clone it, à la Dolly the sheep, using a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Any de-extinction via this process would therefore involve prioritising which DNA sequences to target, yielding a gene-edited animal genome that isn’t exactly the same as the extinct one. “It would take hundreds of years to go through and do it with our current technology,” Pask says. We would probably use another, like a Tasmanian devil or a dunnart … eat meat, so they’re going to have a much more thylacine-like digestive system.”Ĭurrently, gene editing isn’t advanced enough to be able to change all of the differing sequences to thylacine DNA in a timely manner. “We wouldn’t use the numbat because of its specialisation as an anteater. Though the numbat is genetically similar to the thylacine, it is not an ideal candidate for gene editing, Pask says. “It’s in lots of little tiny pieces when we get it from an extinct specimen, so the DNA is broken up. “It’s one of the best genome builds we have for an extinct animal,” he says. In 2017, Pask’s team sequenced the thylacine genome from a juvenile specimen held in Museums Victoria’s collection. The first step in this process requires an intact genetic blueprint of the extinct animal, says Prof Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne. One de-extinction avenue scientists are exploring is to take the genome of a living species and edit its DNA to more closely resemble that of an extinct relative. Can we really revive a species from extinction, and if so, should we? Building a genomic puzzle It seems hard to imagine that the carnivorous marsupials might once again roam the Apple Isle in future, but recent advances in gene-editing technology have scientists convinced that de-extinction is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction. The last known Tasmanian tiger died in 1936, but the apex predator – which once also roamed the Australian mainland and Kangaroo Island – continues to beguile and obsess even in extinction.
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