“This technology, which works in chickens…. The techniques could allow scientists to move specific genetic traits between bird species to help protect them as habitats shrink and the climate warms. However, Shapiro said that perfecting these synthetic biology tools will have wider implications for bird conservation. The approach involves removing primordial gems cells from an egg, cultivating them in the lab and editing the cells with the desired genetic traits before injecting them back to an egg at the same developmental stage, she explained.Įven if the team is successful in this high-stakes endeavor, they won’t be making a carbon copy of the dodo that lived four centuries ago, but an altered, hybrid form. Shapiro said she hopes to adapt an existing technique used involving primordial germ cells, the embryonic precursors of sperm and eggs, that has already been used to create a chicken fathered by a duck. However, the subsequent work that’s needed to resurrect the animal - programming cells from a living relative of the dodo with the lost bird’s DNA - will be significantly more challenging. It’s a process which would allow them to narrow down which mutations in the genome “make a dodo a dodo,” Shapiro said.Ī dodo skeleton on display at a museum in Mauritius. The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family - the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project - fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA - based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark. Shapiro is the lead paleogeneticist at Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering start-up founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, which is working on equally ambitious projects to bring back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. And it’s our responsibility to bring stories and to bring excitement to people in way that motivates them to think about the extinction crisis that’s going on right now,” said Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re clearly in the middle of an extinction crisis. They hope the project will open up new techniques for bird conservation. Now, a team of scientists wants to bring back the dodo in a bold initiative that will incorporate advances in ancient DNA sequencing, gene editing technology and synthetic biology. They doomed the dodo, which showed no fear of humans, to extinction in the space of just a few decades. The arrival of sailors brought with them invasive species like rats and practices like hunting. “There’s a real hazard in saying that if we destroy nature, we can just put it back together again - because we can’t,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who has no connection to Colossal.No other animal is as inexorably linked with extinction as the dodo, an odd-looking flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean until the late 17th century. Other scientists wonder if it’s even advisable to try, and question whether “de-extinction” diverts attention and money away from efforts to save species still on Earth. The concept is still in an early theoretical stage for dodos.īecause animals are a product of both their genetics and their environment - which has changed dramatically since the 1600s - Shapiro said that “it’s not possible to recreate a 100% identical copy of something that’s gone.” It may be possible to put the tweaked cells into developing eggs of other birds, such as pigeons or chickens, to create offspring that may in turn naturally produce dodo eggs, said Shapiro. The team may then attempt to edit Nicobar pigeon cells to make them resemble dodo cells. Her team plans to study DNA differences between the Nicobar pigeon and the dodo to understand “what are the genes that really make a dodo a dodo,” she said.
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