This host will then grow up with sperm or eggs which carry the dodo-like genome, and not their own.Ī similar technique was used to produce a hatchling of the vulnerable Houbara bustard. What form these modifications will take is still not known, but they would presumably have to include characteristics such as flightlessness and an enlarged bill.Īs bird PGCs travel through the blood, it means they can then be injected into a bird once it hatches. Colossal plan to extract these PGCs from a Nicobar pigeon embryo grown in a lab, and then genetically modify them to have a genome more like a dodo. In fully grown animals these cells give rise to the sperm and egg cells (gametes) and migrate through the embryo to the developing gonads.īut in birds this process happens slightly differently, as the PGCs travel to the gonads through the blood. While the cell's nucleus, which contains an organism's DNA, is easy to locate in mammals, it is much harder to locate in a developing bird egg simply due to its size.Įven if the nucleus is found, scientists are yet to find a way to remove, edit and then reinsert it back into the egg after it has begun to form.īecause of this Colossal plans to take a different approach by modifying what are known as primordial germ cells (PGCs). The main issues that will be faced in resurrecting the dodo relate to the differences in the reproduction between birds and mammals. The genome will be used as a guide to incrementally edit the genetics of the Nicobar pigeon until a surrogate would be able to lay an egg of Colossal's dodo. 'And even if Colossal succeeds, I don't think we will see anything beyond a de-extinct hybrid lineage in the foreseeable future.' 'Even with a fully sequenced genome, and recent breakthroughs in gene editing technologies, achieving this will not be easy,' Martin adds. Otherwise, this process will take quite some time. Using this as a guide, the team then hope to genetically modify the genome of the bird's closest living relative - the Nicobar pigeon - to make it more similar to that of the dodo's.ĭr Martin Stervander, who researches the genomics of flightless birds at the Museum, says, 'This project is not aiming to resurrect the dodo as it originally was, but instead produce a hybrid lineage which resembles the dodo to a reasonable degree.'Ĭolossal has said that they hope to speed this up through the development of new methods, with an emphasis on using technology to develop more efficient genetic editing techniques and automate the process. At the time of writing, however, the genome is yet to have been published in a scientific journal. To recreate the species Colossal hopes to use a fully-sequenced dodo genome, which Shapiro announced that her team had reconstructed last year. Among the team working on the project is Professor Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient genomics who has previously sequenced a fragment of mitochondrial DNA from a dodo specimen. Instead, Colossal is proposing to make a living replica of the species. Nothing short of a time machine would allow the species to exist today. The original species is, as the saying goes, dead as a dodo.
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