De-extinction: Gene Editing Technology Might Help Bring Back Extinct Species to Life

Thylacines, popularly known as Tasmanian tigers, were common throughout Australia millions of years ago. However, these dog-like animals with stripes went extinct from the mainland some 2,000 years ago. They stayed in Tasmania until the 1920s when European colonists perceived them as a menace to cattle and murdered them.

Geneticist Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne is leading a team of scientists and collaborates with the de-extinction business Colossal Biosciences to rebuild and reintroduce thylacines, BBC reports. But the wolf-like species is only one of the extinct animals that could be rediscovered using the gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9.

Reintroducing Extinct Animals to the Wild

The first known attempt at thylacine de-extinction was in 2017. Since it was such an important marsupial, there are hundreds of samples of it in every major museum around the world and some of them were exceptionally preserved.

Pask said that their sample came from a baby taken from its mother's pouch. After the mother died, the baby was immediately dropped into alcohol to preserve its DNA. Since then, it served as a miracle specimen and the holy grail to building a genome. Still, it was not completely whole and exposure to UV light as well as bacteria broke down DNA into fragments.

So, they took samples from a small mouse-sized marsupial called dunnart to provide a blueprint. Both animals share 95% of their DNA and are highly conserved, which means it has not changed much over time.

But as BBC reported, it was not just thylacine that scientists want to bring back that went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago. Some efforts are also being made to bring back the woolly mammoth. Their frozen DNA found in the Arctic tundra provides a good sample to sequence their DNA.

Other animals that scientists are planning to reintroduce also include the auroch the prehistoric cow that has been the subject of ancient cave paintings around the globe. More so, they are using gene editing technology to clone animals, such as the Pyrenean ibex, and the southern gastric-brooding frog.

Will These Animals Resemble the Original Ones?

According to Science Focus, these animals can never be exactly the same as the original. Scientists would have only created an animal that may resemble the source of their DNA but not exactly the same.

For example, they can only make an elephant with some characteristics of a wholly mammoth, like having shaggy fur, thick rolls of insulating body fat, and hemoglobin that can carry oxygen even at freezing temperatures. They may look like a mammoth but in reality, they are an elephant whose DNA has been altered to live in the cold.

Moreover, scientists noted that animals are a product of their DNA and the environment where they live, as well as the interaction between the two. That means the experiences of the new-age animals made from ancient DNA will be different from the owner of the genome themselves.

Nonetheless, it might not matter if the de-extinct animal looks and acts like its predecessor.

Check out more news and information on De-extinction in Science Times.