Posted on 03/10/2022 1:03:53 PM PST by BenLurkin
When sequencing the genome of an extinct species, scientists face the challenge of working with degraded DNA, which doesn’t yield all the genetic information required to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct animal. With the Christmas Island rat, which is believed to have gone extinct because of diseases brought over on European ships, evolutionary geneticist Tom Gilbert at University of Copenhagen and his colleagues lucked out.
Not only was the team able to obtain almost all of the rodent’s genome, but since it diverged from other Rattus species relatively recently, it shares about 95% of its genome with a living rat, the Norway brown rat. “It was a quite a nice test model,” says Gilbert. “It’s the perfect case because when you sequence the genome, you have to compare it to a really good modern reference.”
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.
Though the sequencing of the Christmas Island rat was mostly successful, a few key genes were missing. These genes were related to olfaction, meaning that a resurrected Christmas Island Rat would likely be unable to process smells in the way as it would have originally. “With current technology, it may be completely impossible to ever recover the full sequence, and therefore it is impossible to ever generate a perfect replica of the Christmas Island rat,” says Gilbert.
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
Just what we need.....more rats...............
Plenty of rats in the Congress and Senate.
Cool... What could possibly go wrong? </sarcasm>
Don’t worry, we’ll just resurrect some super-cats to eat the super-rats. If the super-cats get out of control, we can resurrect some super-canines, and if they get out of control, we can install sliding glass doors around the island for them to run headlong into.
Rats spread diseases to kill us...we bring diseases to an island and kill rats (which most likely arrived there by human conveyance anyway), then we restore the rats. Hmmm...
The giant rat of sumatra?
Wake me up when they can do a T Rex.
A rattus of unusual size?
Saber Tooth Tiger should fill the bill.
we don’t need any more rats, nor do we need smarter, healthier, and faster mice.
Since they are always testing things on mice, why didn’t they test mask-wearing on mice? I’m guessing because PETA would have charged them with animal cruelty, so they just put the masks on people, and especially kids.
I was hoping someone would get the reference.
Wow. There’s a stock image out there for everything.
LOL.
What next dodo birds?
or maybe giant mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds that would be so cool
Might inspire another Jurassic Park sequel...
;>)
Isn’t it a good thing these vermin are extinct? Do rats add any value to anything? Would it be a bad thing if all rats went extinct? Add mosquitos and poisonous spiders to that list speaking as a Brown Recluse bite survivor.
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