Forget mammoths: These researchers are exploring bringing back the extinct Christmas Island rat
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but in a paper published March 9 in the journal,and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.De-extinction work is defined by what is unknown.
After the DNA has been sequenced as well as possible and the genome is matched up against the reference genome of the living species, the scientists identify the parts of the genomes that don't match up and, in theory, would then use CRISPR technology to gene edit the DNA of the living species to match that of the extinct one. The brown-rat-to-Christmas-Island-rat scenario is a particularly good test case because the evolutionary divergence is similar to that of the elephant and the mammoth.
"It is very, very clear that we are never going to be able to get all the information to create a perfect recovered form of an extinct species," he says."There will always be some kind of hybrid." Though a replica will never be perfect, the key is that scientists are able to edit for the DNA that makes the extinct animal functionally different from the living one.
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