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Modern Day Noah's Ark Dying
hype7 writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running a story about the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development's Gene Bank, which appears to be running out of funding. It seems a terrible shame, because the Bank has managed to accumulate thousands of Australian and foreign endangered species; a kind of modern day Noah's Ark. At the moment it's in limbo, using funds diverted from other projects to keep it in ER, but the prospects aren't looking good."
Species rescue program faces extinction ... Professor Alan Trounson in the Gene Bank. Photo: Simon Schluter
... we always get a good hearing, but not the support financially."
"You can't create biodiversity. But it's something you can lose"
By Tom Noble
A program that saves the genetic material of threatened animal species faces a bleak future because of a lack of money.
The Gene Bank at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development has material from thousands of animals in storage, mostly native species facing extinction.
But work on storing new specimens and developing cloning techniques that could mean the survival of some species has been slowed because of no direct funding and little interest from corporate or private sponsors.
"I think it does say a little about our priorities, which I think is sad," said Alan Trounson, IVF pioneer and deputy director of the research institute that is a world leader in IVF and stem cell work.
"I don't know how many boardrooms we've been in, how many people we've seen
A key project has been on the northern hairy-nosed wombat, which once roamed across large areas of Victoria, Queensland and NSW. It is now Australia's most endangered mammal with fewer than 100 remaining, confined to a small area of the Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland.
The wombat's only hope of survival may lie in a silver barrel at the Gene Bank, where cell lines from more than 40 of the wombats (grown from little bits of flesh when the animals were given ear-tags) sit cryogenically frozen, ready to be cloned when the technology becomes available.
Set up in 1996 with a Federal Government grant and corporate sponsorship, the Gene Bank - dubbed a Noah's Ark of endangered animals - began by storing sperm and eggs taken from endangered animals that had died, often in zoos. The advent of cloning meant any part of the animal would do, as long as cell lines could be grown.
The cells of thousands of animals - mostly natives, but other endangered species such as the African black rhino - from dozens of species are now stored.
A modest amount of money has allowed the Gene Bank to survive, diverted from other institute programs. "It's been put into neutral for the time being," said Professor Trounson.
Requests from NSW authorities to store native fish taken during a clean-out of rivers, as well as an oyster species threatened by pollution and disease, cannot be met.
The Gene Bank, the only one of its type in Australia, has lost its technician and the laboratories used for the program face being taken over by a well-funded program on cattle breeding.
"You can't create biodiversity. But it's something you can lose," says Professor Trounson. "Every animal we lose that doesn't have a common close relative is a big problem. It's something you can never get back."
Since European settlement, at least 19 animal, 20 bird and three amphibian species have become extinct in Australia. Hundreds of species are now regarded as threatened.
"The community don't seem to care really deeply about biodiversity because they are not facing it every day. But it's a big concern among naturalists, conservationists and scientists. There's a decimation of these species."
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
You don't have to go to Australia to find lack of funding endangering valuable genetic resources; The National Seed Storage Lab in Colorado is in exactly the same boat...er, ark. Read about their funding problems here. An excerpt:
What does this lack of funding mean? It results in another major problem for the banks:
germination backlog, currently of about 30,000 samples at the NSSL. Periodic germination tests
are important to assure the quality of the samples. Also, since seeds will not store indefinitely,
they must periodically be removed, grown out for new seed, and collected. Says Major
Goodman, a crop scientist at NC State who investigated the status of the samples, "Evaluation,
regeneration and utilization are essential parts of a functioning germplasm system. Yet the entire
emphasis...is based upon acquiring larger and larger numbers of samples to be stored in so-called
seed repositories..." A more accurate name, according to Goodman, is "seed morgues." The
samples that are most at risk are older or unusual varieties that are rarely requested, and
germination potential of these samples deteriorates. According to NSSL director Steve Eberhart,
who estimates that it would take 25 years to catch up with the backlog, "We normally test seeds
every ten years to make sure they'll still viable...we've had to eliminate our retesting in order to
process new materials. We don't know which material is deteriorating because we don't have the
staff to the do the germination." For example, there are 30,000 varieties of corn from Latin
America with four scientists assigned to grow and evaluate them. Each person can do 30 varieties
a year, totaling 120. At that rate, it would take 250 years to evaluate them all! Many of the corn
varieties will not survive to be regenerated.
First off, it's unlikely that we'll have the ability to "create the species from a given genetic code" any time soon. Our ability to create proteins from specific sequences goes to mabye hundreds or thousands of base pairs, not tens or hundreds of millions.
And even from there it's a long way to living cells, and still further to multi-cellular organisms.
Second, Celera may make it look easy to sequence a genome, but it still takes months to do and millions of dollars. Plus you still get lots of errors, any one of which could make it impossible to reproduce an organism.
And finally, there's a lot that goes on in cells that's not coded up by the nuclear DNA. There's mitochondiral DNA, for starters. And the whole bootstrapping problem: producing an organism requires an incredibly complex environment provided by its mother. The instructions for that are, of course, largely in the DNA, but it's incredibly tricky to bootstrap it from there.
I've got DNA from only 4 species in my freezer:
Chicken
Cow
Salmon
Pig
http://secure.metro.net.au/monashiv/donate.htm
That's the link to donate. Remember folks, that's in Australian dollars - roughly 2 AUD:1 USD
-- james