Stalking Venus

Scientists at the Universities of Melbourne and Texas are going all Jurassic Park on our asses and trying to bring dinosaurs back to life.

In an unprecedented and landmark event, the scientific teams headed by Andrew Pask of the Melbourne University’s Zoology department managed to extract a gene from an extinct Tasmanian tiger and insert it into the growing embryo of a laboratory mouse.

In order to do this, the scientists had to first extract fragments of a gene called Col2a1 from four thylacines that have been dead and preserved in ethanol for 100 years. DNA breaks down over time, so extracting enough pieces to form a complete gene was an incredible success itself. Pask likened the task to assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle.

This is an amazing step forward in understanding and utilizing gene technology, but we’ve still only just left the starting post. While it would be great to be able to clone an entire extinct Tasmanian tiger, the experts say we’re not there yet.

Marilyn Renfree, a university of Melbourne zoology professor and member of the team says, “It’s a nice dream to have, but it’s probably not going to happen.” Cloning an entire thylacine would involve recreating some 30,000 genes and assembling them correctly into chromosomal packages – something that we currently just don’t have the technology or resources to do.

In order to ensure that the new gene was going to work and have an effect after it was implanted in the mouse embryo, it was first modified by adding a bacteria gene that turned the thylacine gene blue. After Professor Richard Behringer, deputy head of the Department of molecular Biology at the University of Texas carefully inserted the modified thylacine gene into the mouse embryo, the blue marker could be seen growing in the mouse cartiledge.

Scientists have been able to study genes taken from extinct animals in test tubes for a while. “We wanted to show it was possible to take a gene from an extinct animal and look at its function in a living animal.”

In future experiments, the team are hoping to be able to extract more specialized genes such as those that give the thylacine its dog-like features or striped skin and combine them in studies to give us more information about our genetic past.

While the ability to create a striped mouse using thylacine genes may seem frivolous at first, it could lead to later experiments that have huge scientific value. “This has not been done for fun,” said Professor Renfree. “It has been done to learn more about the biology of a creature that we, humans, made extinct.”

Genetic experiments of a similar nature may never truly end up bringing dinosaurs back to life, but they may well serve to tell us more about what they were like when they did live: Were they warm or cold blooded? Did they have smooth skin? Questions that help close the knowledge gap of our ancient past.

The team’s research and findings were published in the international peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLos ONE. The journal article can be read in full here.

Sources: PLos ONE, Sydney Morning Herald.