![]() ![]() Most de-extinction researchers aren’t looking to resurrect a charismatic ancient beast just for the sake of putting it into the nearest zoo for viewer pleasure. But for Novak and most other de-extinction researchers, creating a proxy instead of the real thing is not a problem - it’s the goal. “You can never bring something back that is extinct,” he said. “The biggest misconception about de-extinction is that it’s possible,” said Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.īen Novak, a lead scientist for Revive & Restore, one of the front-running non-profit organizations in the de-extinction effort, readily acknowledges this. Though the results from Gilbert’s group are new, in many ways they underscore something that many scientists have understood for a long time. “And so what you’ll end up with is nothing like what went extinct.” “It’s not just the irrelevant stuff that you’re not going to get back,” Gilbert said. Many of the missing genes were related to immunity and olfaction, two highly important functions for the animal. Yet despite their best efforts, the scientists were unable to recover nearly 5% of the Christmas Island rat’s genome. Reconstructing the extinct rat’s genome should have been relatively simple. ![]() This was a far cry from trying to figure out the DNA of some jungle cat from the Pleistocene, let alone a dinosaur. ![]() The samples of DNA from the extinct species were relatively new and well preserved, and the extinct rat was very closely related to the standard brown Norway rat, for which there is abundant DNA reference data. “Look, this is like the best-case scenario,” Gilbert said. Thomas Gilbert, a genomics researcher and professor at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of researchers who tested the feasibility of de-extinction by sequencing the genome of the Christmas Island rat, a species that went extinct in the late 19th or early 20th century. For scientists studying de-extinction - the ambitious effort to resurrect extinct species - a paper that appeared in Current Biology in March was a sobering reality check. ![]()
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