A startup called Colossal based on research by geneticist George Church intends to bring back extinct animals. Church has long wanted to try bringing back a wooly mammoth by editing elephant stem cells to more resemble mammoth genes, then implanting these cloned cells into an elephant for gestation. But there are a lot of problems in the scheme to work with elephants, and mammoth genes are not all that fresh or plentiful.
So Colossal is looking for a more recent extinction to tackle- that of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Thylacines were a carnivorous species of marsupial that was hunted to extinction in the 1930s. There are plenty of samples of thylacine genes that are only 90 years old. While stem cells from marsupials have never been cloned, there are many marsupial species that might work for gestation. Since marsupials leave the womb at an earlier stage of development than mammals do, a species smaller than the thylacine might be about to birth a Tasmanian tiger. Ars Technica talked to Colossal founder Ban Lamm and laboratory director Andrew Pask about the planned project to bring back the extinct thylacine. -via Real Clear Science
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