Out of every creature that has gone extinct, perhaps none is as famous as the dodo bird. But now, centuries after the bird went extinct, scientists are looking for a way to bring the dodo bird back to life.
It’s a bold initiative.
The dodo bird has long been the poster child for how human intervention can contribute to the demise and entire extinction of an animal species. This unique-looking flightless bird once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean. It was first discovered by sailors in the late 1500s. The species had been completely wiped out by the late 1600s. The birds were primarily killed for food. Invasive species introduced by the sailors contributed to their demise as well.
U.S. Biotechnology Company Working to Bring the Dodo Back to Life
Now, centuries later, scientists are working to bring the dodo bird back to life.
Colossal Biosciences, a U.S. biotechnology and genetic engineering company in Austin, Texas, is behind the “de-extinction.” The company’s team of scientists will incorporate advances in DNA sequencing, gene editing technology, and synthetic biology. They hope that this project will be the start of new techniques for bird conservation. It will also hopefully benefit the conservation of other species, too.
“The dodo is a prime example of a species that became extinct because we – people – made it impossible for them to survive in their native habitat,” said Beth Shapiro, the lead paleogeneticist at Colossal Biosciences.
Shapiro, who is also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says she has already completed the key first step of the project. She has fully sequenced the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA extracted from dodo remains in Denmark.
The next step involves comparing the dodo’s genetic information with their closest bird relatives in the pigeon family. This includes the Nicobar pigeon, which can be found in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the Rodrigues solitaire, an extinct flightless pigeon.
Comparing genetic information will help them identify the mutations in the genome that make a dodo. They will then move on to “programming” cells from a living relative of the dodo with the extinct bird’s DNA. While this process won’t create an exact copy of the long-extinct bird, it will give scientists an altered hybrid.
Why Bring Back the Extinct Bird?
According to Shapiro, it’s not just about the dodo. She hopes that perfecting these synthetic biology processes will help bird conservation as a whole. It could allow scientists to give bird species some specific genetic traits to help protect their populations.
“If we find that there’s something that provides immunity against a disease that’s hurting a population, and you know what the genetic changes underlying that immunity or that ability to fight off that disease is,” says Shapiro, “Maybe we can use these tools to transfer that, even between closely related species.”
