For the first time, DNA from an extinct animal has been resurrected inside a living creature.

The donors in this were four 100-year-old Tasmanian tiger specimens preserved in ethanol at the Museum Victoria. The large, doglike marsupial last made history in 1936, when the only remaining tiger died in captivity.

Receiving the DNA were mice in the laboratory of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center geneticist Richard Behringer, who partnered with researchers from the University of Melbourne. The study describing their paleogenetic wizardry appeared yesterday in Public Library of Science ONE.

Behringer's mice don't look unusual. The inserted DNA doesn't actually code for Tasmanian tiger characteristics, but is needed to switch on genes controlling bone formation. But hybrid Tasmanian tiger-mice could someday be created, said the researchers, and DNA from creatures like woolly mammoths and neanderthals revived.



Why would scientists want to do this? Of all the DNA that's ever existed, only one percent is presently in circulation. The rest is lost to history, along with the insights it might provide. By bringing back lost genes, scientists can see what they do.

Could scientists actually bring back entire animals? It's highly unlikely. The Tasmanian tiger DNA was painstakingly cobbled together with fragments taken from each of the specimens; creating an entire organism would require patching together tens of thousands of genes, then packaging them in the correct order. Modern-extinct hybrids are all we're going to get, though study co-author Andrew Pask told the

Herald Sun that putting pterodactyl wings on a mouse might be possible.



A question, Wired Science readers: of animals driven to extinction by man, which would you like to see studied in this fashion? I nominate the aurochs, the giant ancestor of modern European cattle. People have tried to breed them back into existence, but the originals were far larger.

Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome [PLoS ONE]

Images: The modified mouse embryo, with blue coloration corresponding to the activation of Tasmanian tiger DNA, courtesy of PLoS ONE;

Tasmanian tigers courtesy of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; and an aurochs from WikiMedia Commons.*

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