Revive and Restore

FBBird said:
Not sure I understand the mechanics of this, but wouldn't a Mourning Dove be a better surrogate than a Band-tailed Pigeon?
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Is body size an important consideration here? Mourning Dove was closely related to PP but quite a lot smaller?
 
Pertinax said:
Is body size an important consideration here? Mourning Dove was closely related to PP but quite a lot smaller?
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It would be an extremely important factor and consideration in a project like this. That's one problem many species they want to clone back face, the fact that their closest relatives are way too small!

~Thylo:cool:
 
CambsVet said:
I imagine the author left out some more recent extinction as those animals cant yet be cloned as there is no suitable host. There isnt a big enough marsupial to be able to implant a thylacine zygote, and I dont believe they have found a way to make/clone a bird within a bird egg.
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I would have thought Thylacines would give birth to a tiny undeveloped joey like a Kangaroo.
 
Just found this article on recreating an extinct frog.

Bizarre extinct frog brought back to life - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Imagine a frog that can swallow its eggs, brood its young in its stomach and give birth through its mouth.

The gastric brooding frog existed 30 years ago, but the extraordinary amphibian is now extinct.

In a world first, a team of Australian scientists has taken the first major step in bringing it back to life.

They have successfully reactivated its DNA and produced an embryo.

Professor Mike Archer from the University of New South Wales is part of the team, which also includes researchers from the University of Newcastle.

He says the amphibian was no ordinary frog.

"In the stomach these eggs went on to develop into tadpoles and the tadpoles then went on to develop into little frogs," he told ABC radio's AM program.

"And like any pregnant mum, when you have little babies rattling away in your stomach saying, 'let me out', she would then open her mouth and out would pop little frogs.

"The first people that saw that were aghast. By the time anybody got excited about it, suddenly it was extinct.

"So that's certainly one of the driving reasons why this would be a focal animal for seeing if we can de-extinct this amazing frog."

That is exactly what a team of Australian scientists is doing.

After locating a few carcases stored in a deep freezer, they have been able to recover tissue from the gastric brooding frog.

Using a laboratory technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, they have implanted the dead cell nucleus from the extinct species into a fresh egg from another related frog.

The reproductive process then took over, and the scientists have created an embryo.

"There was one day in the laboratory that was so exciting when all of a sudden the egg from this living species that had had one of these extinct frogs nuclei inserted into it, started to divide, and then divide again," Professor Archer said.

"We were holding our breath and then it just kept going.

"There were high fives all around the laboratory. It was an extremely exciting moment and it went on to develop an embryo."

By developing the embryo of the gastric brooding frog, the scientists are one step closer to bringing this species back from extinction.

So far the embryo has only survived 36 hours.

By teaming up with scientists in the United States, Professor Archer is confident that producing a tadpole is a step they can take.

"We are in a research zone beyond where anyone else has been before and there's no sign post," he said.

All these [extinct and endangered] species are hanging out, hoping these trials will succeed because that will give them a second crack at life.
Professor Mike Archer
"There's no milepost to tell us how far you've got to go to get to your goal.

"I guess I am optimistic that teaming up with this other group, I'd like to say within the next couple of years we'll have this guy hopping back again."

And it is not just frogs.

By creating a tool using the animal's DNA, the team hopes the technique can be used as a way of future-proofing a species, and down the track bringing other extinct animals back to life.

"There's so many, the crescent nail tail wallaby, the lesser bilby, even some of the ones that are dreadfully endangered now like the North Queensland hairy nose wombat," Professor Archer said.

"All these species are hanging out, hoping these trials will succeed because that will give them a second crack at life.
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Monty said:
I would have thought Thylacines would give birth to a tiny undeveloped joey like a Kangaroo.
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Yes they did. The problem would more likely be finding a host that was able to accomodate the growing young until they reached independence. The two obvious surrogates for a potential Thylacine clone would be the other larger Marsupial predators, the Tasmanian Devil and the Tiger Cat(Quoll). I have recently read that the gestation/period spent in pouch to weaning, of Thylacine pups was believed (from old records) to have been closer to the Quoll than to the Devil, so despite its smaller size, that might be the better host.

As it might well be impossible for either of these smaller species to sustain Thylacine pups in their pouches untl they became independant, they would presumably have to be removed part way during their development and artificially raised. However that might not be too difficult, as there are records of small young Thylacines (found in the pouch?) being successfully handraised.
 
Here we go again: reversing extinction with cloning

An article about a recent conference on reversing extinction using improved cloning techniques has appeared in the New York Times.

The article mentions an Australian team working to produce new individuals of the Southern gastric brooding frog. Apparently they have gotten as far as producing embryos (none viable so far).

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/s...th-and-quandaries.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
 
I would say a break through on successfully cloning extinct animals is very close.

I would imagine that one day they will be able to use kangaroos to carry thylacines using Immunosuppressing drugs etc. Makes sense to use a common animal like a kangaroo as they would be around the same size and they are very common so it's not the end of the world if it goes wrong.

I think a Kangaroo could also be used as a foster pouch, as all mammal milk is quite similar, so for the first few weeks, until old enough to take a bottle, a kangaroo could perhaps carry the baby thylacine.
 
Here is an update on the progress of this group, and some interesting opinions. I'm thinking the passenger pigeon is a good species to start with, as its habitat is still largely there and its unlikely to have any major ecosystem impacts or cause much consternation among the public (such as a large mammal might). I am concerned that these sorts of projects might detract from current conservation work, but hopefully that won't be the case.

Story here: Extinct species revival raises hopes, fears | Stuff.co.nz

7/6/2013

The world's last passenger pigeons perished a century ago. But a Santa Cruz research project could send them flocking into the skies again, using genetic engineering to restore the once-abundant species and chart a revival for other long-gone creatures.

The promise and peril of "resurrection biology" - which could bring back other long-gone species such as the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger but runs the risk of undermining conservation efforts - was the topic for experts who gathered Friday at Stanford University's Center for Law and the Biosciences.

"The grand goal is to bring the passenger pigeon back to life," said researcher Ben Novak of Revive and Restore, supported by entrepreneur Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation of San Francisco and conducted at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "We're at the baby step of stage one."

After studying old and damaged gene fragments of 70 dead passenger pigeons in the lab of UCSC professor Beth Shapiro, the team will assemble - in computers - the genetic code of the bird once hunted to extinction. They hope to complete that within a year.

Within two years, they plan to synthesise the actual DNA code, using commercially available nucleotides. This material will be inserted into the embryo of the passenger pigeon's closest living relative, a band-tailed pigeon.

Then there will be new challenges, Shapiro said.

"We need to turn it into a creature. We have to raise a captive breeding herd. Then there is the tricky part of going from a captive breeding bird to a live, thriving population in the wild," she said.

Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions, blackening the skies and inspiring naturalists like John James Audubon, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. They had vanished by the first World War, victims of hunting and habitat loss.

But resurrected flocks reintroduced into a modern environment could be an invasive species, noted Andrew Torrance of the University of Kansas Law School. They also would be genetically modified organisms, subject to federal regulation.

"This could make reintroduction a challenge, under current law," said Alex Camacho, director of UC Irvine's Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources. "The Endangered Species Act did not contemplate revival of extinct species."

Some conservationists say bringing back lost species will distract from conservation of living species in danger of extinction. Why work to restore the woolly mammoth, they ask, when poachers are killing off African elephants?

"I am concerned that people will not work hard enough to keep species from going extinct," said Terry Root of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.

Others ask: Is there still a role for these species? How would an animal fare in a world much different from the one it left?

But there is also hope that revival would help restore the world's diminishing biodiversity.

Extinction may not be forever, due to such fast-moving scientific progress, said conference organiser Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences.

"My current view is that it is worth pursuing in a careful and prudent way," he said.

Given California's acrimonious battles over allocation of water for wildlife and humans, some residents may not welcome the return of now-extinct fish species, such as the thick-tail chub, said Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who cautioned he was not speaking for his agency.

What about the California grizzly bear - "Do I bring that back?" he asked.

"At some point we will be doing this. . . . We've rounded a corner. . . . We need to stop worrying about theoreticals and start discussing how it will happen," he said.
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One big issue I can think of when it comes to the Passenger Pigeon is that bringing them back could possibly spark an increase in air planes/bird incidents. I mean we're talking about a species that flew in flocks numbering in the millions! While it may not be an immediate problem it's something that must be thought about for the future.

~Thylo:cool:
 
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