Tasmanian tigers are back. Sort of. A small bit of the extinct marsupial’s DNA is alive and well in the cells of some genetically engineered mice.
Scientists have produced proteins from mammoth and Neandertal genes in cells, but the new study, appearing in the May 19 PLoS ONE, is the first to examine the activity of an extinct piece of DNA in a whole animal.
Scientists from the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston extracted DNA from alcohol-preserved specimens of the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine. The researchers then inserted into mice a piece of thylacine DNA that controls production of a collagen gene. The thylacine DNA worked, switching on a marker gene in cartilage-producing cells in a mouse embryo, essentially resurrecting a bit of the extinct animal.