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Cenozoic Park: Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger
Mirk writes "The
Australian Museum
reports a breakthrough in their plans to clone the Tasmanian Tiger. The ``tiger'', actually a carnivorous marsupial, became extinct in 1936, when the last known
specimen died in captivity. Er, did I say ``extinct''?
Now it looks like what everyone thought was an extinction may be
``a 70-year hiccup'', to quote the press release. The museum's Evolutionary Biology Unit have successfully replicated individual Tasmanian Tiger genes using a process known as
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)."
Scientists don't go around cloning every extinct animal. Not every animal died because of evil humans, some died because they weren't fit to survive in this world. Bringing them back now, when other species have evolved, could throw everything off balance and screw up the world even more.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
State funded cloning... kinda like a movie I just watched yesterday.
Get your Unix fortune now!
...but they won't be.
Environmental activism is supposed to be all about preserving "Earth's delicate balance," of which extinction is a natural, and vital process.
But, of course, they'll overlook that if it means injecting a cutesy-woosty puddy-tat back into a wild that no longer finds the critter-witter necessary, because we got one over on the evil-weevil human beings.
*shrug*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Couple of comments on the ever-so-brief-and-simple press release:
(1) No mention of the increasing research into why cloning large mammals if more difficult than thought. See recent New Scientist magazines for pop coverage.
(2) No mention of host animals. The Tiger can't be brought back whole and entire, something needs to act as a host - 90% close relative, 10% recovered DNA. Then work up.
(3) No mention of gene pools and viable population sizes. Pick one human - clone a breeding population from them. Fancy working with them? Didn't think so.
Still, interesting project!
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the test tubes of the night,
What immortal laborat'ry
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Sorry.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
... is cloning slashdot articles!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Tasmanian tiger, not Tasmanian devil. In the future, please pay more attention to the details; they're important.
You can find out more about "Tasmanian Tigers" at The Thylacine Museum. In reality it's a marsupial, not a mammal, and so it's closer to an opossum than a feline like a tiger. The only reason it's called a "tiger" is because of its stripes, as seen in the photo at the top of this webpage about mysterious animals. And it may not even be extinct...
For the theoligically inclined:
Could this be classified as the dead rising from the grave...?
For the atheologically inclined:
The theologically inclined will be thinking this...
http://www.tased.edu.au/tot/fauna/tiger.html
"The Tasmanian Tiger , also called the Tasmanian Wolf, is a large marsupial native to Tasmania. Most scientists believe it to be extinct, however each year there are about a dozen unconfirmed sightings in remote areas of the state, and several reported sets of Tiger tracks."
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PCR doesnt get you a clone
you need a host egg and the actual DNA I would like to see them synthsize it but somehow I dont think so
regards
john jones
The breakthrough here is that PCR confirmed that there was very little damage to the ethanol preserved specimen. The next step is that they are planning on using PCR amplified DNA to "rebuild" the genome of the Tasmanian Tiger. To my knowledge, all other cloning involves injecting cell nuclei into oocytes (eggs). This has the advantage of preserving genes in the proper context. This is probably not possible with the preserved specimens.
Trying to re-build the entire Tasmanian Tiger genome, essentially from scratch, to produce artificial chromosomes is a huge undertaking - by the researcher's estimates, this could take 10-15 years.
All you really need to do is look at the track record of the introduction of foreign species into environments that had not evolved with them.
;) -- the introduction of the mongoose to fight the rat population in the sugar cane fields has had a negative impact on the native bird populations.
Take Hawaii (okay, share it with the rest of us
Or to quote my favorite Jeff Goldblum line:
"You were so busy trying to see if you could do it that you didn't stop to think about whether you should."
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
4. Does it taste good ?
That's like saying "Go ahead and fry that mission critical server, I have backups!" Sure, it'll save your ass, but its no way to run things.
Or we could:
a) Manage wildlife conservation at a reasonable level. (Control poaching, destruction of environment, etc).
b) Accept that fact that species become extinct, regardless of whether by human hands or not. Why bring them back just for the sake of doing it. (See Jurassic Park for an extreme example).
We should never mess with nature. Something as simple as introducing a new species in a different environment has caused havok around the world. (Like Zebra mussels in the great lakes). Can you imagine some genetically altered species roaming around, interbreeding and the like?
We can't even get rid of Zebra mussels, this is an ecological nightmare waiting to happen!
I'm capped, and yet I still whore.
DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is:
5' ATTTC 3'
then the other strand is:
3' TAAAG 5'
The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.
When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands:
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)
and each strand has it's complement added.
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'
The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)
UAA
floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.
So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:
5' ATTTG (long space........) TCGTC 3'
3' TAAAC (long space........) AGGAG 5'
and you add:
TAAAC and TCGTC
You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.
More history here.
A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The Sydney Morning Herald have just done an article on this. While it doesn't cover much more than the one linked in the article, it has links to some other SMH articles. One Of them is an interview with one of the main scientists behind it, and is quite insightful. The other is a gallery of relevent photos.
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
unless it's adaptation was "appeal to genetic scientists as a good candidate for a Polymerase Chain Reaction"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's human mitocondrial DNA. The mitocondrial Eve is not our common ancestor, or even our common genetic ancestor. She is the most recent common ancester of all humans alive on earth today w.r.t. matrilineal descent. See the BBC explanation for further enlightenment. The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is a mathematical fact (unless something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true. Few people subscribe to the multiple-origins theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve observation is a refutation of multiple-origins). Since she has been identified as well (as much as possible,) this is not a theory.
That said, the chances of mutation from breeding two related individuals may be higher than those of unrelated individuals, but they are not absolute certainties. Some degree of variation can be recovered, and while that may not be a huge amount of variation, it's more than they've currently got.
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I'd sure like it if a couple of species would return to existence that were obliterated earlier.
Two examples from the last several hundred years include the great auk and the passenger pigeon.
Two examples of species that humankind hunted to extinction (since they were such wonderful food sources) include the woolly mammoth and the giant sloth.
I recall an historical account of the last great auk being killed so that it could be stuffed and placed in the British museum. The collectors also took pains to destroy the last eggs in the nest at the same time. Gives you some idea of how much our views of what is fitting and proper for us to do in the world can change over a few hundred years.
Now that there are so many of us humans in a finite sized world, and our technological means of changing the world are more influential, it behoves us to give more and more thought to the consequences of our actions.
It's really only our capability for reasoning and thought that gives us a chance of beating the other animals for long term survival of our species.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The Tassie devil has been suggested as a host. The big advantage for the thylacine, and the reason why it will probably be the first successful recovery, is that it is a marsupial, which means it is born when it is basically still a foetus. This means that the host animal can be kept on immunosuppressants for the short duration of pregnancy without rejecting the embyo or getting too screwed up itself. Something like a mammoth, on the other hand, would need to be carried for 18 months inside what would end up being a very sick elephant.
"Not every animal died because of evil humans, some died because they weren't fit to survive in this world."
Fitness to survive in the world has nothing to do with it. A meteor falls, and everything with a body mass greater than 100kg dies out. Were the larger animals less fit? A volcano erupts. A species dies. A flood wipes out a nesting ground. Chalk up another one. Human sailors bring in rats, goats and row plants, destroying practically all native flora and fauna of whole island chains.
Were any of these things destroyed because they were less fit? Of course not. If your building catches on fire, are the survivors more "fit" or are they simply lucky enough to be working on the first floor?
Despite the pitifully bad dialog of Jurassic Park, natural history does not represent some featureless plain on which species struggle against each other and the best win out. Catastrophes happen. Climates make sudden, radical shifts. Disease runs rampant. New vegetation suites are established. Chance is everywhere.
And chance is all it takes. Abandon any idea that the creatures you see around you are "better" than what came before. Different? Sure. Better? By what standards? They're here because of chance built on chance, built on chance. Feedback loops tend to enforce the status quo, keeping many species stable over millions of years (a feature generally absent for the last 12,000 years) but the best predator on Earth can't live if all the prey die and forest dwellers die when the forest goes bye.
The Thylacine happened to be a predator on an island where humans decided to raise sheep. It was fully "fit" in the environment before this point. Afterwards, it was "unfit" in the sense that it's hide was not bulletproof and it had an unfortunate predilection for traps.
Should we worry about the return of extinct species? At some point, yes, but not because some anthropomorphic "nature" selected them for extinction. We should worry because these creatures may be all too "fit" and have behaviors, breeding strategies, or feeding habits that are exceptionally successful in a modern setting.
Do you oppose the return of Grey Wolves to the Yellowstone Basin, or the reintroduction of Grizzlies to their historic range? Like the thylacine, these are creatures that have been absent from these territories for multiple generations. And the areas to which they are being "returned" have often experienced radical changes in the intervening years. Watching the ups and downs of these "reintroduction" projects should give us a good preview of the pitfalls to avoid when someone wants to put just a few Mastadons in Missouri.
This is just the atheist's version of the religious argument that science should "not play God." Something infinitely wiser than us has not ordained that something should be, therefore man should not rightly make it be.
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