Michael Archer's TED talk: Resurrecting the gastric brooding frog and the Tasmanian Tiger

Wikipedia

Paleontologist and former Australian Museum Director Michael Archer is working to de-extinct the gastric brooding frog and the Thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger), as mentioned recently on this blog. Archer recently gave an interesting TED talk on his involvement with two projects working towards 'de-extinction' of several species.

Turning back extinction clock

The fruit of a narrow-leaved campion, buried in permafrost by a ground squirrel 32,000 years ago on the banks of the Kolyma river in Siberia, has been coaxed into growing into a new plant, which then successfully set seed itself in a Moscow laboratory.

Although this plant species was not extinct, inch by inch scientists seem to be closing in on the outrageous goal of bringing a species back from the dead.

The mammoth is the best candidate for resurrection mainly because flash-frozen ones with well-preserved tissues are regularly found in the Siberian permafrost.

Read more here.

Is cloning the answer for extinct species?

Is cloning a viable technique for saving species from extinction, and what are the ethical and ecological implications of bringing animals back from the dead? John Pickerell explores the biological minefield over at the ABC website.

Cloning a thylacine would be very difficult, says geneticist Andrew Pask, who was part of a Melbourne University team that was able to incorporate several functioning Tasmanian tiger genes into a live mouse embryo in 2008. Even though tiger specimens are preserved in jars in Australian museums, the pickling process has not preserved the delicate DNA well.

"For species such as the thylacine, the fragmented nature of the genome poses big issues when trying to reconstruct it," he says. "It is essentially trying to piece back together a 30-million-piece puzzle, without the picture on the box to guide you... The fact is that we will never be able to tell exactly how those repeats go back together, and the best we will be able to do is compare these pieces to a closely related animal genome - so getting a puzzle box picture of something similar."

Unfortunately, the Tasmanian tiger has few close living relatives and it's hard to imagine which could act as a surrogate. We also have no idea how thylacine DNA was arranged into chromosomes. "The best option would be to take those from a [relatively] closely related species such as the numbat, and replace sequences that look different between the thylacine and the numbat," says Pask. "But it is a huge undertaking and well beyond the capabilities of current labs."

Read the whole article here.

Dr Mike Archer talks about his unusual resume

Professor Mike Archer is a palaeontologist, and professor of biological sciences at the University of NSW.

In his time he's been involved with a project to recover the DNA of the extinct thylacine, aka Tasmanian tiger, using a museum specimen.

And now he's working on another top secret project to bring back a different iconic extinct Australian animal...

Listen to the interview here.