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"Lazarus Project" Clones Extinct Frog
cylonlover writes "Australian scientists have successfully revived and reactivated the genome of an extinct frog. The 'Lazarus Project' team implanted cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept in a conventional deep freezer for 40 years into donor eggs from a distantly-related frog. Some of the eggs spontaneously began to divide and grow to early embryo stage with tests confirming the dividing cells contained genetic material from the extinct frog. The extinct frog in question is the Rheobatrachus silus, one of only two species of gastric-brooding frogs, or Platypus frogs, native to Queensland, Australia. Both species became extinct in the mid-1980s and were unique amongst frog species for the way in which they incubated their offspring."
Is this some kind of reverse Jurassic Park story where the frog accidentally had a few strands of dinosaur DNA thrown in and starts breeding into dinosaurs?
As an atheist, I am offended that the name given to such a scientific triumph is that of a fairy-tale produced by the world's most dangerous delision.
As long as they aren't cloning any Raptors, or giving them hover-boards, I think we're OK.
-1 Comment Contains Portal Reference
okay, okay Commander Shepard. But you must get in the line!
Some of the eggs spontaneously began to divide and grow to early embryo stage – a tiny ball of many living cells.
That's really cool. I hope they get a full specimen soon.
Next step: velociraptors.
...welcome out new amphibian overlords.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vj2e1m7Hlgw/TSRzvDOTZTI/AAAAAAAAxUk/JWOcv-P25Fo/s1600/vliz.jpg
Silence is a state of mime.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/15/1639254/berkeley-scientists-plan-to-jurassic-park-some-extinct-pigeons-back-to-life
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
This is the thing I still don't get about cloning extinct species. The mitochondria are also part of the organism, but they don't seem seem to ever get taken into account when there is talk of cloning. If you take the mitochondria from one species and the nuclear DNA from another species, what do you get? You could easily argue that you get a sort of hybrid species, which is not quite the same as either parent species.
In order to really call it a clone it should have survived longer and actually produced a living frog.
As it stands now it is just a bunch of cells damaged to an unknown degree of severity.
When did the 1970s become 40 years ago?
It will be interesting to see how effective this is. DNA is not the sole source of information for an organism's morphology. Nuclear transfer has shown some traits which are not dependent on DNA. It will be very interesting to compare the morphology of the final organism to the original, extinct species.
Engineering and the Ultimate
It's easier to revive an extinct frog than to make a working Pascal development environment for Linux.
No one panic, to keep them under control they will only clone female frogs.
As with jaguars, this will be considered one of the worst DNA bottlenecks of all time depending, of course, on how many specimens he kept and how many can become viable. If only the one then they'll all be clones even if they start breeding on their own. just think, we may produce thousands of these in a controlled environment only to have them wiped out completely when they run into a bacteria, virus or fungus to which they have no resistance but some other variant member of the species might. it would kill them all and we'd have to start from scratch. Such will be the case with the Tasmanian tiger as well, a wonderful achievement at bringing back an extinct species and with all the fragility of fine porcelain to be kept safe, admired and protected from any outside danger.
Yes, I know there are spontaneous mutations but they take time and these specimens likely won't have that time.
Oh, yeah, "oooh" "ahhhh", that's how it always starts. But then later there's running and screaming.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I wonder if they filled the gaps in the gene sequences with DNA from dino-saaaaaurs...
Boo.
... but filled them in with dinosaur DNA.
Of course: WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong
Shouldn't we have saved the Lazarus project for when Commander Shepard needs it to come back and save the universe again?
This is being overly hyped before the actual results most of us would consider significant. From TFA: "Although none of the embryos survived longer than a few days, the work is encouraging for others looking to clone a variety of currently-extinct animals". I realize that there may be significant steps taken with this attempt, but the real success for most people is when of these things is hopping around.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
Not going to lie, this was my first thought.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Yeah a new home grown invasive species !! Reaching back in time to create the next pestilence :)
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This has me a bit worried.
comment
The Tazmanian Tiger needs cloned.
I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitoes
And before long, they were cloning DNA
Now I'm being chased by some irate veloceraptors
Well, believe me... this has been one lousy day
Jurassic Park is frightning in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone shut the fence off in the rain
I admit it's kinda eerie
But this proves my chaos theory
And I don't think I'll be coming back again
Oh no
I cannot approve of this attraction
'Cause getting disemboweled always makes me kinda mad
A huge tyrannosaurus ate our lawer
Well, I suppose that proves... they're really not all bad
Jurassic Park is frightning in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone let T. Rex out of his pen
I'm afraid those things'll harm me
'Cause they sure don't act like Barney
And they think that I'm their dinner, not their friend
Oh no
Jurassic Park is frightning in the dark
All the dinosaurs are running wild
What a crummy weekend this has been
Well, this sure ain't no E-ticket
Think I'll tell them where to stick it
'Cause I'm never coming back this way again
Oh no... oh no
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Now there's no need to save the polar bears.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I was thinking the same question, but realized that if you think of the functional application of the mitochondria then it is like modular software. You can replace a function or submodule with another function or submodule/subroutine which implements the same functionality in a different way/algorithm/technique. And, as long as the new routine has no side-effects (affecting items not specifically called via the API / calling module variables), then it's a valid replacement that "cannot be detected otherwise".
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In other words, if you can swap out a different mitochondrial family for the usual one, as long as there are no other "side effects", you have a good facsimile of the original. It's like being able to swap out a heart or part of a lung or one kidney in a person with transplant surgery: functional equivalence is sometimes sufficient without exact equivalence being necessary.
On the other hand: WhatCouldPossiblyGoHilarious.
Suppose over the next hundred years, humans were to start doing this, and some of the resulting speciments got into wild. Then we had a very serious catastrophe (nuclear war, asteroid strike, etc) resulting in 1) we stopped doing it 2) (nearly) all the cultural records were lost, so there are no documents explaining what FooLab did in 2041.
Fast forward six millennia, to the year 8013. Scientists would have rediscovered evolution, but unlike today's situation, some of the evidence wouldn't quite add up right. They would see, from looking at DNA evidence, that something very interesting happened in a few thousand years ago. Someone would get an idea, and they would be able to formulate tests to falsify or confirm a brand new theory, called Intelligent Design, and they'd confirm it. Actually, they would probably call it something less stupid, but it really would be an actual theory, in every sense of the word.
Then, miraculously, in 8016, someone finds a cache of ancient documents. It looks like some storage device the year 2016 survived, and they're able to pull some internet discussion threads off it. They see people talking about something called "Intelligent Design" and something else about the world being six thousand years old. Since it's an incomplete document cache, they have no idea where the 2013 "Intelligent Design" came from, that it was made up, rather than being derived from evidence or related to science somehow. The 8016ers have no idea where the 2013 idea of a 6000 year old world came from, they just know that people sometimes mentioned it, usually mockingly.
You're in 8016 and you learn this. 6000 years ago, people were talking about some things that you know to be true, in a limited form. (Most of life isn't only 6000 years old, but some of it is. Presumably the 2016 discussions, for which you have incomplete records, were about similarly limited samples.) What do you think?
You think "oh shit, people have gone through this before, and something horrible keeps happening every 6000 years," and you start building bomb shelters. You also start looking at the DNA evidence for an echo, for a 12000 year old genetic node, although you don't find it. But there are plenty of ways to come up with good conspiracy theories for why it's not there. Maybe the 2013 people realized that the 4000-BC-genetically-engineered creatures were responsible for the 4000 BC nuclear war, and hunted them (nearly) to extinction. You need to start exterminating the 21st century abominations now .. or wait, is that exactly what went wrong in prior cycles, and what causes the bigger catostrophe? OMG by head hurts. What are we going to do? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO!!?!?!!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I realize that Australia has had some unique species but given the fact that the Cane Toad is threatening to wipe out native species and that people are having mass cane toad whacking parties. Why in the hell would they want to bring back another toad, er frog? I mean shouldn't they be spending their energies in coming up with a crocodile that eats cane toads or cats that have 5 inch saber like claws that could kill them? or maybe just an ad campaign "Cane Toad, it's what's for dinner mate!"
This just seems so counter intuitive on so many levels.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Please clone a dodo, apparently they tasted very good!
So the default response amongst the general public is likely to be "bring back dinosaurs!".
I object. We don't know what dinosaurs taste like.
On the other hand, there is historical evidence that Dodos were driven extinct because they were DELICIOUS.
So... ship some samples from the London Museum where there is a preserved Dodo or two, to the Ozzie scientists and get some Dodos going so we can put Dodo burger back on the menu.
Ethical questions abound here - like drones and all new technology there is a wild west period before the dumb masses catch up with what the super boffins are up to. For some reason, I don't mind them trying to revive frogs but once you get into mammalian projects like mammoths and neanderthals I think the possibility of creating tortured "elephant nan" type creatures should eliminate those projects from consideration. There would be about 10 years of monstrous failures before they could perfect that technique with any genome, and they need to face the "should we (answer: no)" questions instead of the "can we" thrill seeking imo. Like imagine the Neanderthal being successfully cloned, carried to term by a surrogate and delivered. Even if it doesn't come out of the womb like a chernobyl baby, which is like a 0.00072% chance, imagine being a minority of #one#. That would be psychologically hellish for a highly sentient being imo.
I don't know :(
All I could think about was season 3 episode 6 of Doctor Who. Egads.No thanks.
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
I like the American Bison. It's the native bovine critter, has excellent meat, plenty of leather and it belongs here. Buffalo Bill Cody and his gang created a major bottle-neck in their genetic code, but there's still plenty of old hides and the like around.
I would like to see something like this used to re-diversify the Bison genome by cloning long dead individuals to make a healthy modern population. All you would have to do is inseminate the existing herds with the old code to expand the base. If it were up to me I would do away with the beef industry in the US and replace it with a Bison industry keeping only some dairy cows when it comes to European bovines. It would increase the health level in the nation quite a bit, even if they were eating McDonald's bison burgers instead of McDonald's beef burgers.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
When a species goes extinct, another one steps up to fill the niche in the ecosystem. Over time it will adapt further to better fill that niche. If an extinct species is reintroduced, it will be in direct competition with a newer species that fills the void that it left. This competition will drive one of the species to extinction, or re-extinction. For example invasive species have displaced 90% of the native plants and animals in Hawaii. Australia has large problems with invasive species as well.
Either way it may be better to let sleeping dogs lie. Reintroducing a species will mean one species gets wiped out. Its a zero sum game, and not a humane one at that.
The functional equivalence I was getting at was not the DNA (or any sort of "API" sort of thing) but the fact that mitochondria play a role as the energy provider in cells by phosphorylation of AMP -> ADP -> ATP. ATP is used as the main energy source in cells, and it's the mitochondria within cells that provides the "refueling"/"recharging" via the Krebs cycle also known as the citric acid cycle. :>) Functional equivalence means "makes ATP" here!
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Yes, mitochondria also play other roles, but you could (probably) take a different DNA-source mitochondrion and be an evil "cellular surgeon" and replace the original mitochondria with Folger's Crystals mitochondria, and the cell will never know the difference. So the functional equivalence I meant is that in terms of generating ATP by phosphorylation and providing the recharging station for the host cell body.
Herding bison? Bison are not endangered in at least past of the American West. Bison are not afraid of people or mountain cyclists, and are quite willing to trample and gore them if annoyed, and are annoyed fairly easily. They can run 40 mph for over a mile, can jump 5 vertical feet, and can walk right through and over most ordinary fences.
I very much doubt the older DNA has more placid traits.
Never heard of Borland Delphi being called a "frog" before..
Instead of modding me all the way to negative one, could someone who believes this is flamebait explain to me why? I didn't bring up the idea of being offended by this name; I simply responded to the naked mockery of the idea. I explained how such offense is rather reasonable, especially in light of the constant stream of offended Christians still doing the political circuit, still shouting at the top of their lungs about how worried and offended they are. I don't advocate that level of games or rhetoric, but it is a simple conscious-raising step to say "you do know Lazarus is a fairy tale thought by hundreds of millions of Americans to be a literal, historical truth, right?"
Expecting us to ignore it is like choosing the username "vaccines==autism" and complaining it's just a joke when someone condemns it. And I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.
Don't these people watch Dr. Who!?! We need to make sure we have David Tennant around for when this thing hits the fan!