DailyDirt: Making Extinction Extinct

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Jurassic Park was just a movie -- there isn't really a practical way to pull intact dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquitoes. But recently-extinct animal species might be cloned because we can actually gather intact DNA and cell fragments that can be manipulated more easily. Here are just a few examples of projects that could create animals that are now considered extinct.

• There are several TED talks on de-extinction, discussing cloning and various animals that could potentially be revived. We could learn a lot from figuring out how to take somewhat arbitrary DNA instructions and produce viable organisms. [url]
• Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, and in 2003, an extinct wild goat (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was cloned, but it died with some major genetic defects. Since then, cloning techniques have gotten better, but re-creating an extinct animal is one thing. Raising a healthy animal that was once extinct is a completely different challenge. [url]
• At the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory in Dubai, scientists have reportedly engineered a male duck to produce chicken sperm that fathered a chicken. The process of introducing chicken DNA into the reproductive organs of a male duck embryo could presumably be used in other birds (especially for other birds that may be endangered). [url]
• An extinct Australian frog species has been brought back to life (almost). Scientists cloned an extinct frog (Rheobatrachus silus) by injecting its dead cell nucleus into a fresh egg of distantly-related frog, (Mixophyes fasciolatus), and observed the embryo grow -- but it didn't survive beyond a few days. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biology, chicken, cloning, dna, duck, extinction, frog, genes, goat, species