New Delhi: Scientists are embarking on a multi-million dollar project to bring back to life an Australian wolf-like, striped marsupial that went extinct nearly 100 years ago.
Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church aim to resurrect the thylacine, or the Tasmanian tiger, that was last seen in 1936.
The 15-million-dollar project between Colossal and Church aims to recreate the animal using gene editing and stem cell reproductive techniques. This is their second project after they declared the resurrection of the woolly mammoth in 2021.
Who were the thylacine?
Not a tiger but Australia’s only marsupial predator, the thylacine disappeared around 2,000 years ago from everywhere except in Tasmania where they were hunted to the point of extinction by European settlers.
The last known animal died in captivity in 1936. While there were reports of its sightings later, it was officially declared extinct in the 1980s. It was found in areas of Tasmania, Australia and New Guinea.
According to experts, the Australian ecosystem suffered degradation and biodiversity loss after the animal’s extinction. Moreover, catastrophic bush fires have impacted millions of animals, pushing wildlife in the country on the fast-tract towards extinction. It is estimated that Australia has one of the highest mammalian extinction rates.
The development of such technologies would aid in the preservation of the ecosystem and marsupial conservation efforts using ancient DNA retrieval and artificial reproduction, through the process of de-extinction.
What is de-extinction?
De-extinction involves identifying the closest looking relative of the marsupial and then using genome sequences of both to compare the similarities. In the thylacine’s case, it is the fat tailed dunnart, which is a mouse-shaped carnivorous marsupial.
Further process involves taking the living cells and re-modifying the DNA to make into a thylacine cell and bring back a proxy living animal.
“Our ultimate goal with this technology is to restore these species to the wild where they played absolutely essential roles in the ecosystem. So our ultimate hope is that you would be seeing them in the Tasmanian bushland again one day,” Andrew Pask, head of the Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research Lab in the University of Melbourne was quoted in Discovery.
The complex process of resurrection
Though no specific timeline has been specified yet, the first mammoth calves could be produced after five to six years as quoted by Colossal founder Ben Lamm. The gestation period of marsupials is smaller as compared to its closest species, the dunnart. The process also involves building artificial wombs for the modified DNA to gestate, where the dunnarts would act as surrogates.
While the reprogramming of the dunnart skin cells into stem cells has been done, the process of testing whether they can generate an embryo is still on.
If completed successfully, the thylacine might be one of the first animals in history to be brought back.
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