Biotech company Colossal Biosciences said it has brought back the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago, through its de-extinction process.
Very interesting, but I would hesitate to call it true de-extinction because there’s no way to know what we don’t know. We don’t know what was in the parts of the DNA we don’t have.
Shapiro’s team had to extract more dire wolf DNA from two existing fossils to better sequence the animal’s genome. From there, Colossal elected to use a close relative of the dire wolf as the base.
“We’ve taken a gray wolf genome, a gray wolf cell. which is already genetically 99.5% identical to dire wolves because they’re very closely related,” Shapiro said. “And we’ve edited those cells at multiple places in its DNA sequence to contain the dire wolf version of the DNA.”
Very interesting, but I would hesitate to call it true de-extinction because there’s no way to know what we don’t know. We don’t know what was in the parts of the DNA we don’t have.
We have the full genome…
Looks like they… almost had it.
They just spliced in frog DNA to fill some of the gaps.