Revive & Restore

Have you ever imagined what it would be to have dinosaurs living with us in this planet? May be in the forest outside the city? Revive & Restore is one initiate involved in this. Well they may not have thought that far; but they are doing their bit towards this fiction story. As per their website, Revive & Restore’s mission is to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species. They have brought together the fields of molecular biology and conservation biology to try and make this happen. They are also working on bringing back from extinction: passenger pigeons, woolly mammoths, heath hens (a New England grouse), and great auks (a north Atlantic “penguin.”). The initiative is working on genetic rescue for Asian elephants (from a lethal virus), black-footed ferrets (from lethal plague and inbreeding), and Hawaiian native birds (from avian malaria). These projects include sequencing and assembling DNA (ancient, cryopreserved, and living), bioinformatic analysis, genome editing, creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), cross-species cloning, work with avian primordial germ cells, and captive breeding.

“Gone”— Isabella Kirkland’s painting of 63 species that have gone extinct since the 1700s.

Look what Stewart Brand, Co-founder, Revive & Restore, has to say on The dawn of de-extinction.

Is it possible to bring back the extinct?

With Biotechnology & Bioinformatics at my disposal,the craziest method I can think of to address this question is to synthesize the genome artificially; pack it into a nucleus and left it to grow inside a cell. Ultimately we are already into the age of synthetic biology. But what restricts us is we are still far from when we can synthesize a whole genome in the lab.

An alternate method may be to edit the genome of a closely related species till we reach the genome of the extinct species. Well that sounds a horrible idea but with technologies as CRISPR-Cas9 targeted gene editing has become much more efficient. Once we obtain the desired genome we may be able to grow into a full organism by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer(SCNT) method for mammals or tissue culture for plants.

We have been able to sequence the entire 3.3 Gigabases of Human genome with highest accuracy by breaking it into small fragments, sequencing them and assembling each fragment. May be we can use a reverse protocol to construct the whole genome; by first synthesizing fragments and then joining them.

This entire idea may seem to be ridiculous now but we are ignorant of how far science can go. Though the focal point of any such project would be bring back the extinct; we may be able to stumble upon a method to stably synthesize long stretches of DNA in vitro.

First posted on LinkedIn: Is it possible to bring back the extinct?