A startup company is attempting to resurrect or recreate the Woolly mammoths. The company wants the iconic giants of the last ice age, which became extinct around 4,000 years ago, to roam the Arctic.
Steppe Mammoth at the Australian Museum
Start-Up Company Plans to Recreate Woolly Mammoths
Ben Lamm, a tech entrepreneur, and George Church, a renowned geneticist, founded Colossal Biosciences, intending to genetically engineer an Asian elephant with all of the essential biological characteristics of its extinct relative to revive the woolly mammoth. While not an exact replica, the hybrid animal will resemble a woolly mammoth and will be able to live in the same ecosystem as the extinct animal.
Gene Editing Technology to Use for Production of Wolly Mammoth-Like Animal
The goal of Colossal is to create a hybrid elephant with woolly mammoth traits, such as thick fur and layers of insulating fat, among other cold climate adaptations, using advanced gene editing technology.
According to Newsweek, Church said the method is very similar to research one of his companies conducted on pigs, whose genomes underwent about 40 changes to make their organs suitable for human transplantation. He stated that Colossal intended to make a similar number of edits in cells taken from Asian elephants. These endangered species shares 99.6 percent of their DNA with the woolly mammoth.
Artificial Womb or Surrogate Mother
In addition, the Colossal team is working on developing the elephant-mammoth hybrid embryo in an artificial womb rather than using a surrogate mother. African elephants are larger species with less difficulty delivering an elephant hybrid and are marginally less of conservation concern, so they are more likely to be used as surrogates than Asian elephants. The church stated that they would allow it to develop outside of the body for a short period of time, similar to how in vitro fertilization works. But then they want to take it to the end.
This has never been done before for any mammal, but researchers have progressed in other animals. For example, a team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was able to support a fetal lamb for four weeks, but the size of a mammoth calf, which typically weighs more than 200 pounds at birth, will be far more difficult.
While using a surrogate mother is more practical due to the technology's demonstrated viability (at least to some extent) in other mammals, Church said the majority of the team prefers the artificial womb approach due to its superior scalability and lack of interference with the reproduction of living elephants.
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) or the researchers would typically use various other editing tools to edit the cell by going in and adding DNA. The nucleus is then extracted from the cell and placed in an egg. Then they implant it into a surrogate mother and wait 22 months, in the case of elephants. Then you have a calf. It is traditional cloning, similar to what was done with Dolly the Sheep. The goal is not to resurrect a species but to resurrect individual genes in a specific constellation that would aid in cold tolerance.
ALSO READ: The Last Days of The Woolly Mammoth: Genetic Meltdown Influenced Their Demise
Environmental Benefits
If Colossal is successful, the company hopes that releasing enough of them into the wild will help to restore the health of the Arctic environment and slow the melting of Arctic permafrost, a process that releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases jeopardizing efforts to combat climate change.
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