As the saying goes: Life finds a way. That’s the idea behind a team of researchers who recently recovered RNA from the extinct thylacine—also known as a Tasmanian tiger—in an effort to resurrect the species. Despite having died in Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936, the creature’s genetic material was able to be extracted and sequenced by scientists from Colossal Bioscience, a biotech startup known for their “de-extinction” projects including efforts to bring back the wooly mammoth and the dodo bird. A paper of the team’s findings was published today in the journal Genome Research. “Our study is unique in this sense as we were able, for the first time, to sequence RNAs from an extinct species, the Tasmanian tiger,” lead author Emilio Mármol-Sánchez, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, told Gizmodo. “This is the first time that we have been able to catch a glimpse of the actual biology and metabolism of Tasmanian tiger cells right before they died.” It should be noted that even with the extracted RNA, the startup won’t be able to completely replicate the Tasmanian tiger but rather a species with genes edited to be close to it. Experts are also concerned about the ethical and ecological implications of resurrecting a long-dead species. In other words, these scientists might be so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
