05-09-2014, 03:42 AM
Revival of the species – Passenger Pigeon
Project “Revive & Restore” from Long Now foundation is all about de-extinction. Their first goal is to revive the famous passenger pigeon, which has been extinct for almost a century, now. It was really a great bird living in North America. There were around 5 billion of them when Europeans arrived there. Their flocks were sometimes long for several hundreds of kilometers and around one kilometer wide. The last known passenger pigeon was named Martha, and it died on September 1, 1914, in Cincinnati Zoo.
There were two main reasons for their extinction – they were hunted a lot, plus their natural habitat, the forest, was decreasing due to the expansion of cities and advancements in industry.
Reviving the passenger pigeon requires different approach due to several problems. The biggest one is the fact that there is no completely intact, functional genome. This could be solved by re-creating the genome - connecting the fragments of DNA from preserved specimens. It won’t be enough, however, since entire genome of an animal cannot be synthesized from scratch. It can be combined with another animal’s genome, though. Traits specific to passenger pigeon can be replaced with the other ones in some relatives, using stem cells.
Rock pigeon genome can be used, for example, and its modified stem cells could be transformed into germ cells, which could be inserted into its eggs. In there, they would move to the embryos’ sex organs. Once the eggs hatch, normal rock pigeons would come out, except that the eggs and the sperm they carry would have the modified DNA containing the passenger pigeon traits. Once the hybrid rock pigeons reach maturity, they could mate and lay eggs that would contain the actual passenger pigeons.
There are some other problems concerning the revival of this species. They are very social, and they tend to form flocks of millions, even billions. They did not stop breading once their numbers went down to several individuals; instead, this happened when there was couple of thousands of them left. This means that probably several thousands of passenger pigeons would first have to be revived in order for them to actually start breeding again.
Project “Revive & Restore” from Long Now foundation is all about de-extinction. Their first goal is to revive the famous passenger pigeon, which has been extinct for almost a century, now. It was really a great bird living in North America. There were around 5 billion of them when Europeans arrived there. Their flocks were sometimes long for several hundreds of kilometers and around one kilometer wide. The last known passenger pigeon was named Martha, and it died on September 1, 1914, in Cincinnati Zoo.
There were two main reasons for their extinction – they were hunted a lot, plus their natural habitat, the forest, was decreasing due to the expansion of cities and advancements in industry.
Reviving the passenger pigeon requires different approach due to several problems. The biggest one is the fact that there is no completely intact, functional genome. This could be solved by re-creating the genome - connecting the fragments of DNA from preserved specimens. It won’t be enough, however, since entire genome of an animal cannot be synthesized from scratch. It can be combined with another animal’s genome, though. Traits specific to passenger pigeon can be replaced with the other ones in some relatives, using stem cells.
Rock pigeon genome can be used, for example, and its modified stem cells could be transformed into germ cells, which could be inserted into its eggs. In there, they would move to the embryos’ sex organs. Once the eggs hatch, normal rock pigeons would come out, except that the eggs and the sperm they carry would have the modified DNA containing the passenger pigeon traits. Once the hybrid rock pigeons reach maturity, they could mate and lay eggs that would contain the actual passenger pigeons.
There are some other problems concerning the revival of this species. They are very social, and they tend to form flocks of millions, even billions. They did not stop breading once their numbers went down to several individuals; instead, this happened when there was couple of thousands of them left. This means that probably several thousands of passenger pigeons would first have to be revived in order for them to actually start breeding again.
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