That stage will be simpler in birds, Shapiro explains, “because everything happens in an egg.” With mammals, scientists don’t yet know how the modified embryo of an extinct species will interact with the intrauterine environment of the host species. So the size of eggs will be consistent.”Īlthough the first stage of genome editing is harder with birds, the next stage should be easier. Ultimately, Shapiro says, “the final version of dodo will emerge from a pigeon that has been engineered to be the size of a dodo. If the process works, PGCs from pigeons would be manipulated to eventually develop into a dodolike bird. Colossal Biosciences is exploring a process to extract avian primordial germ cells (PGCs) from bird eggs. “There is no access to a bird egg cell at the same developmental time as there is for a mammal,” she explains. But, Shapiro says, “we can’t clone birds.” Cloning requires access to an egg cell that is ready for fertilization but not yet fertilized. With mammals, the process is like that used in the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first animal to be cloned successfully from adult cells. One of the biggest challenges in the reconstruction of the dodo is a problem for all avian genomics. It also has multiple teams working in parallel on problems of computational biology, cellular engineering, stem cell reprogramming, embryology, protein engineering and animal husbandry, among other focuses. “Even though we’re nowhere near ready to start implanting embryos into surrogates,” Lamm says, the company currently has a team working on the cloning methodology necessary for that process. The process must ensure that development proceeds correctly, that the animal is born successfully, that suitable surrogate parents nurture the creature, that it is administered a nutritious diet and that it is raised in an appropriate environment.Ĭolossal Biosciences is trying to solve all these problems at once. The edited genome would then be implanted into an egg cell of that related species to develop. Most de-extinction programs aim to re-create a proxy of an extinct animal by genetic engineering, editing the genome of a closely related living species to replicate the target species’ genome. ![]() In reality, this has been impossible to achieve, mostly because viable DNA cannot be found. Technically, a species could be resurrected by cloning DNA from a remnant cell. Though the journey from mtDNA to genome took decades, the path from genome to a living, breathing animal is even more formidable, involving an enormous, interacting set of extraordinarily complex problems. Santa Cruz had reconstructed the dodo’s entire genome. Then, in 2022, Shapiro announced that her team at U.C. That snippet of mtDNA showed the dodo’s closest living relative was the Nicobar pigeon. In 2002 she published research in Science describing how her team had extracted a tiny piece of the bird’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)-the DNA inside little organelles called mitochondria that gets passed down from mother to offspring. Shapiro, also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied the dodo since the science of paleogenetics was in its infancy. “This announcement is really just the start of this project,” says Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist and a scientific advisory board member at Colossal Biosciences. Now the creature represents extinction itself-you can’t get deader than a dodo. The dodoes, which reproduced by laying a single egg on the ground, were also predated by other species, such as monkeys and rats, which humans brought with them. The birds blithely walked up to sailors, so received history goes, and didn’t flinch as their peers were killed around them. The ungainly bird, which stood around one meter tall and weighed about 15 to 20 kilograms, represents a particular kind of evolutionary misfortune: It should have been afraid of humans, but it wasn’t. Native to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, it went extinct in the mid- to late 17th century, after humans arrived on the island. In the world of extinct animals, the dodo carries some heavy symbolic weight. Now, with the launch of a new Avian Genomics Group and a reported $150 million of additional investment, the long-gone dodo joins the lineup. ![]() And a year later it announced such an effort for the thylacine, aka the Tasmanian tiger. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate.įounded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church, the company first said it would re-create the mammoth. Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |