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In other words, a de-extinct mammoth created using gene editing, if such a thing ever comes to be, won’t exactly be a mammoth; it will be closer to a hairy Asian elephant adapted to live in the cold. And the new analysis suggests that the proxy animal version will probably have enough differences that would make it difficult for the creature to refill its previous ecological niche. For some, that might be enough to defeat the purpose of the exercise.
The team found that the Christmas Island rat genome mapped to about 95 percent of the Norway brown rat genome. Further analyses showed that the roughly 5 percent that was missing could not be explained solely by a flaw in the technique or an inadequate reference genome. Rather, because of evolutionary divergence between the two species, most of that genetic information was simply lost. I am not doing de-extinction, but I think it's a really interesting idea, and technically it's really exciting," senior author Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP. Wyatt KB, Campos PF, Gilbert MT, Kolokotronis SO, Hynes WH, etal. (2008). "Historical mammal extinction on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) correlates with introduced infectious disease". PLOS ONE. 3 (11): e3602. Bibcode: 2008PLoSO...3.3602W. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003602. PMC 2572834. PMID 18985148. For that reason, the Christmas Island rat ( Rattus macleari) was an obvious choice for analysis for the scientists. It diverged from a close relative, the Norway brown rat ( Rattus norvegicus), only around 2.6 million years ago.Even if gene-editing were perfected, replica animals created with the technique would thus have certain critical deficiencies.
The team used brown rats, commonly used in lab experiments, as the modern reference species, and found they could reconstruct 95 percent of the Christmas Island rat genome. A DNA study found Maclear's rat to be the sister species of Hainald's rat native to the island of Flores, with the clade containing the two being sister to the clade containing Nesokia and Bandicota; this clade, in turn, is sister to the Australasian Rattus radiation, making Rattus as currently defined paraphyletic. [8] See also [ edit ] This has important implications for de-extinction efforts, such as a project by US bioscience firm Colossal to resurrect the mammoth, which died out around 4,000 years ago. Lamoreux, J.; Woinarski, J.; Burbidge, A.A. (2016). " Rattus macleari". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2016: e.T19344A22440729. doi: 10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-1.RLTS.T19344A22440729.en . Retrieved 12 November 2021. Mammoths have roughly the same evolutionary distance from modern elephants as brown rats and Christmas Island rats.
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The reference assembly problem will always be a barrier to de-extinction,” Novak says. “Anyone pursuing de-extinction has to settle on the fact that we want to get as close as we can to something that fools the environment.” As a science, it’s awesome,” Gilbert says. But “is this the best use of the money in a world where we can’t keep our rhinos alive?” The rat is named after Captain John Maclear (1838–1907) of the British survey-ship HMS Flying-Fish, who collected the specimen from Christmas Island in 1886. It was described as a new species by Oldfield Thomas the next year, although it was originally described under the genus Mus. [2] [7] Maclear was earlier commander on HMS Challenger for the Challenger Expedition of 1872–1876 under its commission captain, Sir George Nares.
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