Since launching in 2021, Colossal has raised $225 million from several investors, including the United States Innovative Technology Fund, Breyer Capital, and In-Q-Tel, "the CIA's venture capital firm which invests in technology," AP explains. Colossal asserts the "process will slow the long-term impacts of human-induced loss of biodiversity and give threatened species a buffer against outright extinction as numbers dwindle." The process will allow them to study which mutations "make a dodo a dodo," Shapiro says.Īlong with resurrecting extinct animals, the company says it plans to develop a library to house genetic material and embryos of endangered species. They will compare the genomes of the dodo and its closest relatives, the Nicobar pigeon and the Rodrigues solitaire, which is extinct. Using genetic material gathered from dodo remains in Denmark, they have fully sequenced the dodo's genome from its DNA. Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead paleontologist at Colossal, says her team has already completed the first step in the project, CNN reports. Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal, called the bird, which disappeared less than 100 years after being discovered by humans, "a symbol of man-made extinction," per The Associated Press. The company is moving forward with plans to revive the the dodo. "De-extinction is something of a misnomer," says Gizmodo, since it does not bring an extinct creature back to life "as it existed in the past," but instead offers "science's best analog for an extinct creature." Revived species cannot have all of their ancestors' genetic, behavioral, and physiological properties, so technically, scientists are creating close copies, or "proxies." What is Colossal doing? Genome editing is a process by which scientists manipulate the genetic material of a living organism by "deleting, replacing, or inserting a DNA sequence." Scientists can use this process to create a hybrid between an extinct species and a closely related living organism. Because cloning requires the use of intact living cells, it is only really suitable for species on the brink of extinction - not those that have already disappeared. In the process of cloning, researchers create "genetically identical biological life copies," Colossal explains. With selective back-breeding, scientists locate subjects that carry ancient traits from related extinct species and selectively breed them. Cloning is the most well-known de-extinction method, though back-breeding and genome editing also fall into the category. Why do researchers want to revive species that are long gone? What is de-extinction, and how does it work?ĭe-extinction, also known as "resurrection biology" and "reanimation," reverses extinction in plants and animals using the genetics of closely related living species, explains Colossal Biosciences, the company behind the efforts to revive the dodo bird. Scientists at a Dallas, Texas-based company recently announced that they would be attempting to bring the dodo bird, which became extinct in 1681, back to life with a process called de-extinction.
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