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+--- Thread: Article Head in a bucket to bring Tasmanian tiger back to life (extinct animal engineering) (/thread-16692.html)
Head in a bucket to bring Tasmanian tiger back to life (extinct animal engineering) - C C - Oct 19, 2024
How a ‘putrid’ find in a museum cupboard could be the key to bringing the Tasmanian tiger back to life
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/17/how-a-putrid-find-in-a-museum-cupboard-could-be-the-key-to-bringing-the-tasmanian-tiger-back-to-life
EXCERPTS: Breakthroughs sometimes turn up in unexpected places. The researchers working on the international push to bring back the thylacine say they found theirs in a bucket in the back of a cupboard at a Melbourne museum. It contained an astonishingly well-preserved head of the extinct marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
“It was literally a head in a bucket of ethanol in the back of a cupboard that had just been dumped there with all the skin removed, and been sitting there for about 110 years,” Prof Andrew Pask, the head of the thylacine integrated genetic restoration research (with the acronym Tigrr) lab at the University of Melbourne, says. “It was pretty putrid, a completely gruesome sight. People had chopped large chunks off it.”
Aesthetics aside, the specimen had a lot going for it. It contained material the scientists thought would be impossible to find, including long RNA molecules crucial to reconstructing an extinct animal’s genome. “This was the miracle that happened with this specimen,” Pask says. “It blew my mind.”
A year on, he says it has advanced the work of the team of Australian and US scientists who are trying to resurrect the species more than expected at this stage. “We are further along than I thought we would be, and we have completed a lot of things that we thought would be very challenging and others said would be impossible,” he says.
[...] The thylacine researchers aim to take stem cells from a living species with similar DNA to a thylacine, the much smaller fat-tailed dunnart, and turn them into the closest approximation of thylacine cells possible using gene editing expertise developed by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Colossal’s co-founder.
[...] On when a thylacine might be created, Pask says he expects the first “thylacine-looking thing” could be born within three to five years, but that he “wouldn’t call that a thylacine”. He says the researchers are confident in creating a thylacine’s skull, legs and even stripes, but there are “still other things we still don’t know how to do”.
Other scientists are watching on with varying degrees of caution and scepticism. Some ask why so much funding and effort is going into bring back species when thousands that are still alive are on the brink of extinction. Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University, says it is an ambitious project and likely to lead to breakthroughs that could help with conservation. But he says there will be other challenges “if-and-when we bring back thylacine-like animals”. (MORE - missing details)