The Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial that once inhabited the forests of Tasmania, may be saved from extinction after a team of American and Australian researchers announced a series of scientific breakthroughs.
Also known as thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), the Tasmanian tiger, was the size of a Labrador and roamed the forests of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. Although it was nicknamed a tiger because of the stripes on its back, it was actually a marsupial, a type of Australian mammal that raises its young in a pouch.
Credit: National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.
The last specimen died in captivity a Hobart Zoo in 1936 afterward the rest was hunted to extinction in a bid to protect Tasmania’s growing livestock industry.
However, an American scientific company based in Dallas, called Colossal bioscienceswhich also attempts to bring together the woolly mammoth and to dodo, teamed up with Australian scientists at the University of Melbourne to find a way to recover the Tasmanian tiger.
Progress to “revive” the Tasmanian tiger
Most attempts to reconstruct the genetic code of long-extinct species are thwarted by the fact that DNA is fragile and breaks down over time.
But a specimen 108 years preserved in a Melbourne museumallowed the team to extract a thylacine DNA sequence that they say is 99.9% identical to the original.
“The thylacine samples used for our new reference genome are among the best preserved ancient specimens my team has worked with. It’s rare to have a sample that can exploit ancient DNA methods to such an extent,” said Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientific officer.
They were even able to extract more fragile RNA molecules from the specimen’s skin and muscle tissue sample, allowing them to identify particular Tasmanian tiger genes.
Ben Lamm, principal entrepreneur at Colossal, the biotechnology company seeking to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger. Credit: Colossal Biosciences.
“With this new resource in hand, we will be able to determine what a thylacine could taste like, what it could smell like, what type of vision it had and even how its brain worked,” the researcher said. Professor Andrew Pask, University of Melbournewho collaborates on the project.
But having the thylacine genes is only one step toward its resurrection.
Colossal’s approach uses gene-editing techniques to modify the genome of the thylacine’s closest living relative, a hamster-sized marsupial called fat-tailed dunnart to create a creature as similar to the thylacine as possible.
They claim to have made more than 300 thylacine-derived genetic “edits” in the cells of the dunnart grown in the laboratory, in addition to having learned to induce ovulation in the little marsupial and to cultivate its embryos outside its uterus, like the techniques used in human in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Not everyone agrees
Could Tasmanian tigers come back? Public domain.
However, the project is not without its critics. Some environmental advocates say the millions of dollars invested by companies like Colossus would be better spent on preserve the habitats of animals currently threatened with extinctionwhich includes, for example, a fifth of Australia’s native mammals.
Others argue that it would be unethical to return long-extinct animals to habitats so degraded by human activity that they might not currently be able to support the extinct inhabitants. for a long time.
Although the idea of ”resurrecting” extinct species, known as “de-extinction,” has captured the imagination of scientists and dreamers for decades, what was once pure science fiction is beginning to take shape as a real possibility thanks to the progress made. .in biotechnology and genetic manipulation. He will rise and we will see…
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