(Web Desk) -The Tasmanian tiger, a wolf-like marsupial that once stalked the forests of Tasmania, could be brought back from extinction after a team of US and Australian researchers claimed a series of scientific breakthroughs.
Also known as the thylacine, the labrador-sized beast was Australia’s last marsupial apex predator.
The last one died in a Hobart zoo in 1936 after the rest had been hunted to extinction in a bid to protect Tasmania’s growing livestock industry.
However, its recent demise makes it an ideal candidate for “de-extinction”, according to Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based company behind the effort.
Colossal has previously announced plans to use the latest advances in gene editing and reproductive biology to bring woolly mammoths and even the dodo back from the dead.
“The thylacine samples used for our new reference genome are among the best-preserved ancient specimens my team has worked with,” according to Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer.
“It’s rare to have a sample that allows you to push the envelope in ancient DNA methods to such an extent.”
But a 108-year-old specimen preserved in alcohol at a museum in Melbourne has allowed the team to extract a thylacine DNA sequence they claim is 99.9% the same as the original.
They were even able to extract more fragile RNA molecules from the sample. This allowed the team to see which of the thylacine’s genes were being expressed in certain tissues.
“With this new resource in hand we will be able to determine what a thylacine could taste, what it could smell, what kind of vision it had and even how its brain functioned,” said Professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne, who is collaborating on the project.