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Science

Bringing Back Extinct Creatures May Be Impossible (science.org) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the every-gene-matters dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: An extinct rat that once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean may have put the kibosh on scientists' dreams of resurrecting more famous extinct animals like the woolly mammoth. The Christmas Island rat disappeared just over 100 years ago, but researchers now say even its detailed genome isn't complete enough to bring it back to life. The work "shows both how wonderfully close -- and yet -- how devastatingly far" scientists are from being able to bring back extinct species by genetically transforming a close relative in what's called "de-extinction," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study. [...] To bring back an extinct species, scientists would first need to sequence its genome, then edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Next comes the challenge of making embryos with the revised genome and bringing them to term in a living surrogate mother. So far, scientists have sequenced the genomes of about 20 extinct species, including a cave bear, passenger pigeon, and several types of mammoths and moas. But no one has yet reported re-creating the extinct genome in a living relative.

In the new study, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, thought it best to start small. "If we want to try something so crazy, why not start with a simple model," he reasoned. So, he, Jian-Qing Lin, a molecular biologist at Shantou University, and their colleagues, focused on the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), which disappeared by 1908 from that island, located about 1200 kilometers west of Australia. This species "should be a dreamy candidate for de-extinction," McCauley says, given its close relationship with the Norway rat, a well-studied lab animal with a complete genome sequence that scientists already know how to modify.

Gilbert and Lin extracted DNA from the skins of two preserved Christmas Island rats and sequenced it many times over to get as much of the genome as possible. They achieved more than 60 times' coverage of it. Old DNA only survives in small fragments, so the team used the genome of the Norway rat as a reference to piece together as much as possible of the vanished rat's genome. Comparing the two genomes revealed almost 5% of the Christmas Island rat's genome was still missing, Lin, Gilbert, and their colleagues report today in Current Biology. The lost sequences included bits of about 2500 of the rat's estimated 34,000 genes. "I was surprised," Gilbert says. The recovered DNA included the genes for the Christmas Island rat's characteristic rounded ears, for example, but important immune system and olfaction genes were either missing or incomplete. The work "really highlights the difficulties, maybe even the ridiculousness, of [de-extinction] efforts," says Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos.

Others researchers like Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, says that the missing 5% of an extinct animal's genome likely won't affect how the transformed animal looks or behaves.
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Bringing Back Extinct Creatures May Be Impossible More

Bringing Back Extinct Creatures May Be Impossible

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  • ... they'll always be cheap knock-offs, but you might still be able to fix the ecology with them.

    • ... they'll always be cheap knock-offs, but you might still be able to fix the ecology with them.

      Or not. These species went extinct for a reason, their habitat disappeared, an introduced species out completed or ate them, or something of the sort. We could perhaps bring back the mammoth, but we can't bring back its habitat. Much the same issue applies to many extinct species. The exceptions would be some recently extinct (i.e., human eliminated species), but even that is questionable. We would be better off using those resources to help species that still exist. This whole bring them back from ex

      • Well, the theory actually is that bringing the Siberian mammoths back will actually bring back their ecology, because that's what large mammals do, and IIRC the invasive species that made these rats go extinct was humans so I think in both cases your might be dismissing relevant information that would belie your assertions.

        • Re:In other words... (Score:4, Funny)

          by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @03:30AM (#62342889)

          If God wanted mammoths to coexist with humans, he wouldn't have made them so delicious.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kisai ( 213879 )

        I think it's more likely that these animals died out due to a combination of climate change and invasive species, or maybe just disease.

        Large animals are more succeptable to climate change itself, and many "wooly/saber-tooth" era mammals went extinct because they were hunted to extinction by other mammals/predators. Their surviving relatives (eg mountain lions and elephants) survived, but also shrunk due to there being less food sources.

        It has to be said that anything that went extinct in the last 100-200 y

      • These species went extinct for a reason, their habitat disappeared, an introduced species out completed or ate them, or something of the sort.

        This may be true, but habitats are continually changing. You may not have meant it this way, but this quote implies a common misunderstanding regarding evolution, that evolution is a process of progress. That extinct animals are extinct because better animals have "won" or taken their place.

        Everything is circumstantial. For example, South American marsupials disappeared (except for the possum) once the sea levels dipped and Panama allowed mammals to migrate south and compete with them. In Australia, marsupi

      • I really think you're ignoring the economic potential here.

        Extinct animals could be a lucrative tourist attraction. Come see Christmas Island mice, passenger pigeons, and wooly mammoths!

        Welcome to... Holocene Park. We spared no expense.

  • I guess it depends on whether that 5% that's missing is deactivated history of viral infections or the information for blood coagulation.

    • The difference between a chimp and a human is 1.2%.

      Now, you can extrapolate "how much" is 5%...

      • The point is that not all parts of the genome are equally important.

        Obligatory car analogy: If you remove the 5% of a car that's the rear seats and part of the roof, you have a fancy sports car. If you remove the 5% of the car that's the engine, you aren't going anywhere.

        • Your analogy is flawed: if you take off the rear seats in that 5% is OK for the car: it will keep moving.

          If you modify 5% of the human genome, no matter where it is, you'll have a walking dead with luck.

          • I erred in assuming common background here, but it's important to note the vast amount of our DNA that is Non-Coding (NYT puts it at 98.8$ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0... [nytimes.com]). The real question is, how much of the 5% is non-coding, and how much is coding? If it's coding, how significant is it to the function of the organism? It could be that the 5% is literally everything that significantly composes the creature or it could be old patch notes.

    • Norway rats also have a mechanism for blood coagulation. So you can try substituting the Norway rat blood coagulation gene for the Christmas Island rat version of the same gene. That should work, unless there are complex interactions between a Norway rat gene and a different Christmas Island rat gene - which is possible ("DLL hell in animals") but not certain, so still worth trying.

    • Let's put it in perspective. Say you could breed a Christmas Island rat to a Norway rat. The children would have 50% of their genomes from each. Breed the children to Christmas island rats. The grandchildren's genomes are 25% Norway rat. Keep repeating. The great grandchildren are 12.5% Norway rat. The great great grandchildren are 6.25%.

      5% of the genome is slightly less than a Christmas Island rat with a single great great grandparent that was a Norway rat. It's not nothing, but it's pretty small.

  • and you'll be able to bring it right back.

  • Extinction is forever. Humans shouldn't be playing God in labs. Nothing good will come of this. Repent!

    • Bring back the dinosaurs and in a few million years you've got more oil. What's not to love?

      • Probably the disappointment when you wait a few million years to find out it was plants that became oil.

        • And it was energy from the sun that became plants.

          Fossil fuels just happen to be a really good way of storing that energy.

          We've gotten pretty good at harvesting energy from the sun, but still have not improved on fossil fuels (or artificially generated chemical analogues) as a means of both storing that energy, and getting it to where and when it is needed.

          I would LOVE to find more efficient ways of harvesting excess CO2 from the atmosphere, using solar, nuclear, geothermal or other clean-ish power sources

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )
          Well, the reigning theory is that plants became coal and animals became oil. Plants and coal is pretty well established by plant fossils in the coal, but that doesn't completely rule out some plants becoming some oil.
      • Given how much oil we consume, I find it difficult to believe there were that many dinosaurs. 62 trillion of them all lied down in a mass grave so they could be siphoned off later? Itâ(TM)s probably going to turn out that oil is the kneecap fluid keeping the tectonic plates moving. Lol

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          Or perhaps oil isn't JUST the product of decomposing dinosaur corpses but all kinds of flora and micro-fauna as well..It may also surprise you to learn that oil in different deposits the world over varies quite a bit in overall composition.

          • Ive heard that. The math on dinosaurs just didnt add up. We probably have burned off every dinosaur that ever lived in just a single day of production. Im not even sure we could grow enough biofuel to meet the demand if we turned everything we grew into fuel. How much is it now? 90million barrels a day?

            • Not a popular theory, but I am not convinced that some form of abiogenetic process may not be at work.

              There is still vastly more that we don't know about the mantle that lies beneath the earth's crust, than that we do.

              There isn't much carbon in either one, but there was plenty of it in the air. We assume that it got into the earth via decomposition of decomposing dead animals, and there are data points that make it clear that this was at least part of the process, but I don't know of any proof that it was

              • Even if it were inexhaustible its not a very clean source. If we assumed every gram of biomass, gram for gram, molecule for molecule, became oil, at 90million barrels per day, it seems like we would have burned through all that by now. 90mil barrels per day x 300lb per barrel, then every day we burn 2.7x10^9 lbs of biomass. In just 10yrs that seems really really high. Thats not even counting the coal that was fossilized plants. It just seems like we should have run out a long time ago. And at that rate of c
                • That's precisely it. I'm not afraid of moderate levels of CO2. That may prove to be a good thing on balance because it would make more of the earth suitable for habitation and agriculture as well. But I intensely dislike knowing that millions of people die from particulate pollution, almost all of which could be eliminated if we had a genuinely better way to fuel cars, buses, trains, and planes.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jbengt ( 874751 )
                  There is currently about 1/2 a trillion tons of biomass on the earth. Assuming similar biomass in the past, that the number of animals dying each year make up 0.1% of that, and that 0.1% of that dying animal mass is converted to oil, that's about 1 billion pounds of oil created per year. And dinosaurs lived for more than 150 million years, so that would be upwards of 150 quadrillion lbs of oil, or 500 trillion barrels. That would be enough to last 15,000 years at 90 million barrels a day.
                  Personally, tho

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jbengt ( 874751 )

              The math on dinosaurs just didnt add up. We probably have burned off every dinosaur that ever lived in just a single day of production.

              Highly doubtful. It was probably many forms of life that contributed to making oil, but remember, we've only been burning oil at scale for a couple hundred years, while dinosaurs lived and died by the millions and millions every year for for a period of over 150 million years.

              • True, but each barrel weighs 300lb and we produce 90 million barrels a day. Even if every gram became oil, thats 2.7x10^9 lbs of biomass per day. Its hard to wrap my head around just 50yrs of that level consumption.

    • Humans shouldn't be playing God in labs. Nothing good will come of this. Repent!

      So you don't have any good arguments then?

    • Extinction is forever. Humans shouldn't be playing God in labs. Nothing good will come of this. Repent!

      I wouldn't have a problem with us playing God with organisms crafted in a lab if we kept them on Mars and observed what happened. Of course, they would have to be radically different from earth animals since Mars doesn't have an atmosphere. We could also try Venus. Life on Venus might, over several million years, turn it into a habitable planet.

    • Playing a non-existent creature is impossible because anything you do is something that the non-existent creature has never done. So scientists playing with test tubes are not playing god, for starters because test tubes had to be invented by humans in the first place.

  • So just use the DNA of a frog. (Score:3)

    by ByTor-2112 ( 313205 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @12:10AM (#62342693)

    Mission accomplished. Life finds a way.

  • What shamefully silly space filler. What is not practical with current tech is subject to change.

  • There are typically millions of mine-able of cells in relatively recent fossils. Although a lot is decayed and there are many gaps, with a million cells they should be able fill in just about the entire sequence with some help from AI and statistics to catalog, match, and cross-check segments.

    That assumes we can automate the sequencing of a million beat-up cells. That's probably a few decades away at least, but not necessarily "impossible", as the article suggests. We just need viable nano-bot technology, p

  • Right? There is no possibility that we will ever make any further scientific advancements and go from 95% to 100%? What a fool.

    Furthermore, the author does not understand statistics. Just as there is only a 1% difference between Chimpanzees and humans, there is probably only about a 1% difference between the Norway Rat and the very similar Christmas rat.

    If we start off with 95% of the Christmas DNA, and fill in the rest with Norway Rat DNA which is 99% identical, than the new rat would be: .95 + (.05*.

  • Headline vs Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @01:31AM (#62342789)
    Headline "I am implying this thing is so questionable it's impossible, it must be, it probably is don't read the story you're done."
    Story "We got most of the way to doing this thing already. Maybe we're done or with a bit more work it'll be perfectly possible."

    Good job internet.

    • Really? You mean that one of the two lead scientists in this research did not say this in the article?

      Gilbert now thinks creating an exact replica of a mammoth or a passenger pigeon will be “impossible.”

      Right now, his team is focused on defining the mammoth’s cold-tolerance genes for transferring into elephants.

      Absolutely nothing in this story says that with time, a lot of hard work, and a little magic it will be "perfectly possible".

    • Not only that, even in the story, it states that human genome differs from chimps by just 1%.

      And the very next line says some researchers think that missing 5% of the genome of a critter will not change how it looked / behaves.

      So, anyone planning to remove / change the important 1% genome from a human and see if the human / chimp hybrid looks or behaves the same as "regular" humans?

  • Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos.

    And what a difference that 1% makes. Lets see a chimp or bonobo try to post to Slashdot.

  • Goats (Score:3)

    by Ann Coulter ( 614889 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @02:26AM (#62342847)

    Can we bring back the long extinct Christmas Island goat?

  • Maybe the scientists should focus more on simpler lifeforms, like viruses or flesh eating bacteria...

  • He will surely have the missing parts of the rat's DNA stored in the Omnitrix

  • Why not just use frog DNA?
  • She's an investor in Colossal Biosciences that aims to bring back the Wooly Mammoth.

    https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/colossal-biosciences/company_financials

    Seriously this is just crazy. Even if you could bring them back, who would pay for it? What's the business model? Exotic foods? Wooly Mammoth steaks?

    • Same business model as other oligarchs having elephants, tigers or other exotic creatures running around their property. Because they can and it's a status symbol.
  • Interesting. Only last week was Andrew Pask predicting very confidently that the Tasmanian Tiger will be making a comeback, after his Melbourne University laboratory recently received $5m funding to do it, as he states in this short podcast:
    https://www.abc.net.au/radio/m... [abc.net.au]

  • Maybe they should start smaller?, small with an extinct Microbe and work their way up.

    In addition:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-extinction/ [wikipedia.org]

  • Microbiome is a deal breaker (Score:3)

    by alleycat0 ( 232486 ) on Thursday March 10, 2022 @01:16PM (#62344143) Homepage
    No extinct creature is going to survive for very long without its necessary (exterior and interior) microbiome - and the diversity of microorganisms that would need to be identified and replicated render the chances of bringing back extinct species pretty much zero.

  • Fans will be thrilled, then we'll nuke the hell out of it, rinse and repeat.

  • The incomplete genome will be "Close enough for government work". lol ;)

  • I keep on seeing the "fact" carelessly dropped that "the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos". How can this be accurate, when humans have 23 chromosome pairs; whereas chimpanzees and bonobos have 24?
  • The work apparently focused on species that are already extinct, and some DNA is missing. But there are many species not extinct yet, for which we can get a complete DNA sequence now. If any of these later become extinct, then we'd have a chance to bring them back after we get our act together. So even if they can't de-extinct some species now, it's still a worthwhile effort.

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