Nearly 100 years after its extinction, thylacines may once live again, after scientists made “giant leap” forward in an ambitious project to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger.
A University of Melbourne research lab announced accelerated efforts in the de-extinction of Australia’s only marsupial apex predator on Tuesday, with a partnership with US genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences.
Melbourne scientists believe the first living baby thylacine since the last known Tasmanian tiger died in captivity in 1936 could arrive within just 10 years.
“The question everyone asks is ‘how long until we see a living thylacine’ – and I’ve previously believed in ten years’ time we would have an edited cell that we could then consider progressing into making into an animal,” University of Melbourne’s thylacine integrated genetic restoration research lab lead professor Andrew Pask said in a statement.
“With this partnership, I now believe that in 10 years’ time we could have our first living baby thylacine since they were hunted to extinction close to a century ago.”
Thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, were dog-like carnivorous marsupials with stripes across their back. They once lived across the continent but were restricted to Tasmania roughly 3000 years ago.
The animal was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.
However, Professor Pask said the Melbourne research lab’s partnership would unlock access to CRISPR DNA editing technology and a consortium of scientists and resources for the thylacine de-extinction effort.
“We can now take the giant leaps to conserve Australia’s threatened marsupials and take on the grand challenge of de-extincting animals we had lost,” Professor Pask said.
“A lot of the challenges with our efforts can be overcome by an army of scientists working on the same problems simultaneously, conducting and collaborating on the many experiments to accelerate discoveries. With this partnership, we will now have the army we need to make this happen.”
Professor Pask said TIGGR would concentrate on establishing reproductive technologies tailored to Australian marsupials, such as IVF and gestation without a surrogate. At the same time, Colossal would use its CRISPR gene editing and computational biology capabilities to reproduce thylacine DNA.
According to the University of Melbourne, Colossal Biosciences uses breakthrough gene-editing technologies to advance wildlife and ecosystem conservation. The company is also working towards the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.
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