The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family - the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project - fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA - based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark. Shapiro is the lead paleogeneticist at Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering start-up founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, which is working on equally ambitious projects to bring back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. And it’s our responsibility to bring stories and to bring excitement to people in way that motivates them to think about the extinction crisis that’s going on right now,” said Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re clearly in the middle of an extinction crisis. They hope the project will open up new techniques for bird conservation. Now, a team of scientists wants to bring back the dodo in a bold initiative that will incorporate advances in ancient DNA sequencing, gene editing technology and synthetic biology.
They doomed the dodo, which showed no fear of humans, to extinction in the space of just a few decades. The arrival of sailors brought with them invasive species like rats and practices like hunting. On a practical level, conservation biologists familiar with captive breeding programs say that it can be tricky for zoo-bred animals to ever adapt to the wild.No other animal is as inexorably linked with extinction as the dodo, an odd-looking flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean until the late 17th century. “And where on Earth would you put a woolly mammoth, other than in a cage?” asked Pimm, who noted that the ecosystems where mammoths lived disappeared long ago. “There’s a real hazard in saying that if we destroy nature, we can just put it back together again - because we can’t,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who has no connection to Colossal. Other scientists wonder if it’s even advisable to try, and question whether “de-extinction” diverts attention and money away from efforts to save species still on Earth. The concept is still in an early theoretical stage for dodos.īecause animals are a product of both their genetics and their environment - which has changed dramatically since the 1600s - Shapiro said that “it’s not possible to recreate a 100% identical copy of something that’s gone.” It may be possible to put the tweaked cells into developing eggs of other birds, such as pigeons or chickens, to create offspring that may in turn naturally produce dodo eggs, said Shapiro. The team may then attempt to edit Nicobar pigeon cells to make them resemble dodo cells.
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