https://colossal.com/

Solving the Colossal Problem of Extinction | Colossal


This is a company that is getting funding to bring back extinct species.
News accounts claim that they just gave out 7.5 million in research
grants to scientists dealing with ancient DNA and working on extinct
species. It seems that investors have given this company around 200
million dollars in total to bring back extinct species.

They are hoping that eventually we will have Star Trek like molecular assemblers that will allow them to recreate these extinct lifeforms.

My take is that more money should be put into collecting samples and
driving technology that will allow us to save the millions of species
expected to go extinct in the next century. We already have nuclear
transfer technology, and we have to work on developing surrogate parents
for each endangered species. If we have an extensive genome sequencing
effort for each endangered species and collect enough genomes from each
species we can have a good idea of how to bring a species back if it
does go extinct.

The San Diego Zoo already has a frozen zoo of tissue samples. Samples
have to be collected and preserved so that they can be used to bring a
species back.

If we have several hundred genome sequences of each endangered species
we will have data that can be used to identify the genetic variation
important to the species survival segregating in the population, and we
can identify deleterious variants that can be removed from the few
surviving individuals to give the species a better chance of recovery.
The genetic information could be used to not bring the species back, but
to accomplish something much more reasonable. From just a few
individuals we can use the current gene editing technology to create new individuals with more genetic variation needed by the species. Instead
of trying to recreate whole genomes we would be putting back several
thousand useful sequence variants lost as the population crashed.

I think that they are going about this whole thing the wrong way. We
should be putting a lot of effort to learn as much about the species in
decline as we can, so that if we are able to keep some of them alive in
zoos and nature preserves, we can reestablish viable populations once
their habitats have been restored. Right now it is impossible to
recreate a mammoth, but there might be enough Asian rhinos left so that
we might be able to create a viable population once the species could be reestablished in the wild. We need to know what genetic variation is
out there, and what variants need to be removed. Individuals have a
genetic load of deleterious variants. That is why you can't start a
population from a small number of individuals and expect to succeed.
The last Northern White Rhinos were all related (father and two
daughters) and the two daughters of the last breeding male inherited the
same leg condition that their father had. If they are able to make
embryos from the tissues of the surviving individuals these genetic
defects will have to be fixed, and useful genetic variation that had
been segregating in the population would need to be restored. We
already have the technology to do this. Instead of recreating genomes,
you would just need to tweek an existing genome.

Bringing back extinct species is not the priority. It can obviously be
done at any time, but we need to collect genetic samples from the
endangered species in order to be able to bring them back if we have to,
and we could do it if all we had left was a single breeding pair as long
as we knew what needed to be removed from their genomes (deleterious
variants) and what genetic variation needed to be added to replace what
had been lost from that species.

Ron Okimoto

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