'Jurassic Park' attempt to recreate Tasmanian tiger

[muriel_volestrangler]

Exactly 69 years after the last Tasmanian tiger died in an Australian zoo, scientists are planning to use Jurassic Park-style technology to bring the carnivore back to life.

The thylacine, a wolf-like creature with a backwards-facing pouch and jaws the size of a shelf bracket, was the biggest meat-eating marsupial.
...
Professor Mike Archer, now dean of the University of New South Wales, said DNA recovered from bones and teeth in Australian museum collections had proved to be promising.

"We've undoubtedly got the whole of the genome in the recovered DNA, although there's thousands more genes than we've been able to recover so far," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,12070,1563849,00.html?gusrc=ticker-103704

[Ediacara]

1. Hmmm

Last I heard (which admitedly wasn't recently), both this project and the mammoth cloning project were being scrapped because of poor quality of the DNA. Hopefully at least one of these will end up being successful :-)

[WindRavenX]

2. technology has also improved the last years so that poor grade DNA ...

...can actually be used. It used to be that you needed a HUGE amount of DNA even to use it for forensics...now we can use PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to quickly amplify the amount to DNA that is workable.

Of course, this is quite different from that (where it's not a matter of just quantity OR quality, but both, because you need the whole genome and the integrity of the DNA needs to be decent). A few years ago, that level of integrity had to be higher for it to be workable; I know the technology keeps improving where poorer and poorer grade DNA can actually be used.

Here's hoping, because this could be an invaluable scientific process in the future when we've killed off the tigers, elephants, and cheetahs...and other living things that we have made extinct :(

[beam me up scottie]

3. Oh I hope this works.

We have so much to atone for.

We do need to make sure that the extinct animals have a sizable and sustainable habitat if we do bring them back.

[NNadir]

4. It's a real long shot, I'll bet.

In any case, it's a useless enterprise if the causes of the original extinction still exist.

[lovelaureng]

5. I agree with you. n\t

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Original cause - culls encouraged by the government

The government previously sanctioned culls of the Tasmanian tiger because it hunted sheep. "We're not about to make that mistake again and will not be issuing permits to capture thylacines for any sort of bounty," she said.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=qw1111554903671B223

[freethought]

7. I thought they had scrapped this effort as well.

I read here on DU that researchers intended to extract DNA from a juvenille specimen preserved in alcohol. From what I remember the DNA had degraded so much to become useless.

Could the DNA extracted from the teeth could be the trick! Let's wait and see.