This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the climatic table collaboration.
Scientists from Australia and the US have launched an ambitious multi-million dollar project to bring back the thylacine, a marsupial that became extinct in the 1930s, and reintroduce it to its natural habitat. Tasmanian.
The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, is the second venture of Colossal, a Texas-based “de-extinction” biotech company that announced last year that it planned to use genetic engineering techniques to recreate the woolly mammoth and return it to the arctic tundra.
The NFSA has released color images of the last known surviving Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine, for National Endangered Species Day.
His new project is a partnership with the University of Melbourne, which earlier this year received a $5 million philanthropic donation to open a genetic restoration laboratory for thylacines. The laboratory team has sequenced the genome of a juvenile specimen by Museums Victoria, providing what its leader, Professor Andrew Pask, called “a complete blueprint for how to essentially build a thylacine”.
The thylacine was Australia’s only marsupial apex predator. It once lived throughout the continent, but was restricted to Tasmania around 3,000 years ago. Dog-like in appearance and striped on its back, it was hunted extensively after European colonization. The last known survivor died in captivity in 1936. Despite hundreds of reported sightings in the following decades, and some quixotic attempts to prove their continued existenceit was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.
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Scientists aim to reverse this by taking stem cells from a living species with similar DNA, the fat-tailed dunnart, and turn them into “thylacine” cells, or the closest possible approximation, using gene-editing expertise developed by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Colossal. New marsupial-specific assisted reproductive technologies will be needed to use the stem cells to make an embryo, which would be transferred into an artificial womb or dunnart surrogate to gestate.
Pask said the partnership was the most significant contribution ever made to marsupial conservation in Australia, as more than 30 scientists worked to fast-track the “massive grand challenge” of resurrecting the thylacine. He believed that the first Joeys could be born in 10 years.
Colossal’s CEO and co-founder, tech and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm, was more optimistic, believing it was possible in less than six years, the timeframe the company had set itself to produce the first pair of mammoth calves. .
De-extinction: Scientists are planning the multi-million dollar resurrection of the #Tasmanian tiger. @itiscolosal #DeExtinction #TasmanianTiger
“I think it’s very likely that this is the first animal that we removed,” Lamm said. The Guardian.
The challenges facing the project are significant, and the scientists acknowledge that several innovative steps will have to land for it to be successful. On reproductive technology, Pask said: “We are looking for marsupials growing from conception to birth in a test tube without a surrogate, which is conceivable given the short gestation period of infant marsupials and their small size.”
If successful, the plan would be to introduce the animal into a controlled environment on private land in Tasmania with the ultimate goal of returning it to the wild. The researchers said bringing back an apex predator could help rebalance the state’s ecosystem. But Pask said they also hoped his work could have a broader impact to help tackle an extinction crisis.
He said the world was changing too fast for existing conservation techniques to save many threatened species, noting the catastrophic impact of bushfires on Australian wildlife. “We have to look at other technologies and novel ways to do it if we want to stop this loss of biodiversity,” she said. “We don’t have a choice. I mean, it will lead to our own extinction if we lose 50 percent of the biodiversity on Earth in the next 50 to 100 years.”
He said the team hoped to address concerns about the genetic health of the species: a problem with the now extinct population — by sequencing the genomes of 80 to 100 individuals, and that dealing with genetic diversity was “relatively easy” compared to other challenges facing the research.
The announcement has received a mixed response from conservation biologists. Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University, believed it was unlikely to succeed. “Even if you can do it [in the lab] —and I have my doubts about that— how do you create the thousands of individuals with enough genetic variation needed to create a healthy population?
Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University, said other outstanding questions included whether the project could do more to help threatened species than existing conservation genetics. He said turning a lab-created animal into a wild population would be an “enormous challenge”, but financial support for extinction research should not be seen as a “zero-sum game”.
“Obviously we want, as far as possible, to save the current species that we have, but if someone wants to finance the recovery of the thylacine and they don’t want to finance anything else, why not? If we learn more about genetics that can be used to protect existing species, then all the better.”