Should we forget the saying ‘dead as a dodo’ soon?
The extinct large-sized flightless bird called dodo (Raphus cucullatus) once inhabited the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The first recorded mention of the bird by the Dutch in 1598 marked the beginning of it being hunting down, not only by Dutch sailors, but also by the invasive species brought by them. The killing spree was so successful that by 1662 no more sightings of the dodo were reported. It went extinct.
Now, a group of scientists have successfully sequenced the bird’s entire genome, raising the question whether this big bird – it was 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) tall and may have weighed 10.6–17.5 kg (23–39 lb) – could ever be brought back to life. Scientists have fiddled with the idea of de-extinction for a long time, with species such as the woolly mammoth and thylacine in focus, among others.
According to the new findings, it seems the dodo could be a contender as well. But resurrecting it wouldn’t be so easy, after all.
The genome sequencing feat comes from a team at the University of California which has long been working to map the dodo’s genome. According to professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Beth Shapiro, previous attempts using a specimen from Oxford, UK, were unsuccessful but a “fantastic specimen” from Denmark gifted the team some well-preserved DNA that was complete enough for sequencing.
This particular specimen, which belongs to the Natural History Museum of Copenhagen, gave rise to a “high-quality, high-coverage, dodo genome which will soon be published,” Shapiro said.
Does this mean we could bring the dodo back? Unfortunately, even armed with a full genome it would be very difficult to bring back the dodo owing to the fact that it was a bird.
“If I have a cell and it’s living in a dish in the lab and I edit it so that it has a bit of dodo DNA how do I then transform that cell into a whole living breathing actual animal?” Shapiro said.
“The way we can do this is to clone it, the same approach that was used to create ‘Dolly the Sheep’, but we don’t know how to do that with birds because of the intricacies of their reproductive pathways.”
According to Shapiro, the main difficulty is that avian reproduction represents a “really fundamental technological hurdle in de-extinction,” which nevertheless many scientists are working to leap over.
Shapiro thinks the achievement is in reach, but we’ve a way to go before seeing the dodo alive again.
Well, let’s see.
Sources: 1, 2, 3