Earlier back in the decade, the Australian Museum undertook a program to try and clone a Tasmanian Tiger from what remained of specimens in bottles. In 2005, this project as abandoned due to difficulty.Yet, the notion of cloning the extinct animal lives on. A group of scientists have cloned one gene, and imported it into a mouse.
The blue tint is colouring from yet another species. The mouse is expressing the Col2a1 gene in its cartilage as you can see. With something like 30,000 genes, a full Tasmanian Tiger is going to be hard to recreate through this kind of gene technology, but it is interesting to see some parts of the Tasmanian Tiger that can be brought back.For the first time, researchers have inserted the genetic material of an extinct animal into a living one. The finding shows how lost information about species from the past can be retrieved, and also provides a glimpse into how long-gone creatures may someday get a second chance at life.
"Now that we've shown you can do this, it opens up the floodgates for all kinds of extinct species," says Andrew Pask, a fellow in zoology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and lead author of a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE. The gene that the scientists activated in mouse fetuses contained instructions that helped produce cartilage in the rodent's developing skeleton.
The Tasmanian tiger DNA came from specimens that had been preserved in a museum for over a century. The researchers selected a gene called Col2a1 that is possessed by many vertebrates, ranging from mice to people. By attaching a marker to the Tasmanian tiger's version of Col2a1 that glows blue when stained by a chemical, scientists were able to see the where the mouse's body had expressed the gene of the departed beast.
"We saw the genetic information of an extinct animal get read out into a blue pattern," says co-author Richard Behringer, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
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