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 ...
Keep it away from the monkeys! The result will be...
The vicious Sumatran Rat-Monkey!
We don’t want to “resurrect” them; we want to “exterminate” them.
I have fond memories of plinking rats at the city landfill with a .22. That 2as decades ago when you could still do that.
I used to do that, too, in the late 50s, here in south central PA, when the police would wave as they drove by.
Rats of NIMH.🙄
Didn’t read whole article. The excerpt alone reads like a prologue to an old ‘50s b/w sci-fi horror movie.
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