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It is not possible to bring extinct animals back to life as they were. Even though researchers were able to recover a very high-quality genome from preserved specimen, it was impossible to recreate many key genes, meaning any resurrected animal would differ in some important ways.
Thomas Gilbert says that if you think you are going to create a mammoth, you may be missing something.
Gilbert is not opposed to de-extinction. He says it is possible to create animals that can perform the same role as extinct ones.
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.A few research groups are trying to resurrect extinct animals by using the same techniques as the extinct species, such as genetic editing of a close living relative to make it like that of the extinct species. Colossal is a company that wants to create a woolly mammoth, and the TIGRR lab at the University of Melbourne is trying to bring back the thylacine.
Gilbert says that the problem is that old DNA breaks up into lots of tiny pieces that are hard to reassemble.
The Christmas Island rat, also known as Maclear's rat, went extinct in the early 20th century and the team was able to reassemble most of the pieces.
He says that there is a 5 per cent fraction that we can't make sense of.
It is the parts of the extinct genome that are the most difficult to match and reassemble. The genes that have been evolving the fastest are the ones that make closely related species different.
The parts that can be put back together are the ones that have been lost.
The team was able to recreate half of the Christmas Island rat's genes. It is possible to create an animal with long black hair and round ears if you use genes related to its hair and ears.
The rat's immune system and sense of smell are two genes that could only be partially reconstructed. Gilbert says that a recreated Christmas Island rat might behave differently to the original species because of its smell.
He doesn't have any plans to revive the Christmas Island rat. The team only studied it to see what is possible.
The paper shows that the more evolutionary distance there is between the extinct species and living relatives, the more of the genome won't be correctly assembled.
Does this mean that we will never, ever be able to reconstruct a genome using gene editing that is 100 per cent identical to an extinct organisms? She says that it's not surprising that Colossal won't be able to create an elephant that's adapted to the polar regions.
The goal of de-extinction has always been to create functional equivalents, says Ben Novak at Revive and Restore, a US non-profit whose initiatives include efforts to resurrect the passenger pigeon and the heath hen.
The paper doesn't change anything about how de-extinction works in practice or how the world is going.
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