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https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/effort-to-bring-back-the-tasmanian-tiger-builds-steam/
Colossal, the company founded to try to restore the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, has also decided to tackle a number of other species that have gone extinct relatively recently: the dodo and the thylacine. Because of significant differences in biology, not the least of which is the generation time of Proboscideans, these other efforts may reach many critical milestones well in advance of the work on mammoths.
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Colossal has branched out from its original de-extinction mission to include efforts to keep species from ever needing its services. In the case of marsupial predators, the de-extinction effort is incorporating work that will benefit existing marsupial predators: generating resistance to the toxins found on the cane toad, an invasive species that has spread widely across Australia.
[...]
For the de-extinction process, the goal would be to ensure that the thylacine could survive in the presence of the cane toad. But Colossal has also begun a conservation effort, called the Colossal foundation, that aims to keep threatened species from needing its services in the future.
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Colossal has obtained a nearly complete genome sequence from a thylacine sample that was preserved in ethanol a bit over a century ago. According to Pask, this sample contains both the short fragments typical of older DNA samples (typically just a few hundred base pairs long), but also some DNA molecules that were above 10,000 bases long. This allowed them to do both short- and long-read sequencing, leaving them with just 45 gaps in the total genome sequence, which the team expects to close shortly.
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The final thing the company announced was that it was working on getting dunnart embryos to develop outside of the womb.
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At this point, they've got immature neural cells and have started forming the cells that will go on to form muscles and the vertebrae. But many critical events need to happen in the remaining one-third of the pregnancy, and Colossal isn't ready to talk about what goes wrong to stop development here.
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Hopefully, over time, the company will continue to submit some of its work to peer-reviewed journals.In the meantime, the clear indications of progress suggest that some of the unique features of the marsupials—relatively rapid generation times, accessible reproductive system, and many similarities to well-studied placental mammals—are helping this project move ahead at a reasonably rapid clip.
Previously on SoylentNews:
Scientists Try to Bring Australian 'Tiger' Back From Extinction - 20220531
Tasmanian Tigers Were in Poor Genetic Health Prior to Extinction - 20171212
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday October 25, @09:32PM (2 children)
It's all well and good having the DNA, but there's more to an eukaryote than the nuclear DNA.
1) Mitochondrial DNA, which is outside the nucleus, and inherited almost completely from the ovum. If you are restoring an organism from nuclear DNA, you are missing this.
2) The rest of the extra-nuclear 'scaffolding' in the cell being fertilised, not DNA based.
3) Things learned from 'nuture' - things taught to an organism from (mainly) its parents and other organisms of the same species. Reconstructing a human baby won't get you far with humans, because they are not self-supporting after birth. We don't have parental mammoths, dodos, or thylacines. What use is a baby 'thing' if we don't have adult 'things' around to teach it how to survive?
We are not going to produce mammoths. We might produce something that looks like a mammoth, but we have no way of teaching a baby mammoth how to be a mammoth like the originals. And, without the right environment to put one in, we are unlikely to get a good approximation.
While this is a jolly interesting academic exercise, we should really be doing out best not to drive more species to extinction: preserve what we have. So far, we are not very good at that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday October 25, @10:45PM (1 child)
We can fake it well enough. We can be the adults for the first generation and then once they get established, have them raise subsequent generations. Now, if you're trying to establish a specific culture (say, mammoths behaving exactly like 10k old mammoths did), then that's probably impossible even if we had somehow actual recordings of mammoth behavior from that time.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 26, @05:04PM
I like your point. I'll also add, a tiger does not fail to be a tiger because it was born in a zoo.