Jurassic Park?

[Tigermike 3,674]

Extinct animal's DNA reactivated

In a breakthrough Jurassic Park-like experiment, scientists have resurrected genes from the Tasmanian tiger - a meat-eating marsupial that became extinct more than 70 years ago - by injecting them into mouse embryos.

The Tasmanian tiger, the largest of the carnivorous marsupials, was wiped out in the wild by intensive hunting in the early 1900s. The stripy, wolf-like creatures grew up to six feet in length and had long, stiff tails and bulky heads.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne and Texas University in Houston extracted DNA from four 100-year-old museum specimens, including three preserved in alcohol, the journal PLjoS One reported. They isolated a string of genes from each and injected it into early-stage mouse embryos. Tests on the growing mice revealed that a gene from the Tasmanian tiger called Col2a1 had switched on and was driving the growth of bone and cartilage in the young animals.

"This is the first time DNA from an extinct species has been used to induce a functional response in another living organism," said Andrew Pask, who led the study. Scientists now hope to use the technique to understand the role of other genes found in extinct animals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may...;feed=worldnews

[AURaptor 1,137]

Speaking of Jurassic Park, a working w/ Dr Jack Horner actually retrieved some fibrous cartilage material from the joints of one T.Rex leg bone.

Science

A Major T. Rex Breakthrough

Broken Bone Leads to Discovery of Soft Tissues

By Guy Gugliotta

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A01

Paleontologists have recovered what appear to be soft tissues from the thighbone of a 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, potentially enabling dinosaur research to make a leap into studying the animals' physiology and perhaps even their cell biology, the research team said yesterday.

Working with the remains of a T. rex unearthed in northeastern Montana's celebrated Hell Creek formation, the paleontologists spied the soft tissue when they were forced to break the thighbone into pieces to fit it aboard a helicopter

in the lab, the team systematically removed mineralized deposits from the bone, exposing blood vessels, bone cells and possibly intact blood cells with their nuclei. "The tissues are still soft, transparent and flexible, and we can manipulate the vessels with our probe," said team leader Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

News of the discovery, reported in this week's edition of the journal Science, amazed many scientists. "It's a tremendous thing," Ohio University paleontologist Lawrence M. Witmer said. "It's the first time for anything this old, and if we can start getting the biomolecules of these animals, that will take us to a place we have never been."

Schweitzer said the team is conducting further chemical analysis to determine whether individual proteins could be isolated from the specimen. She said she did not know whether it would be possible to recover DNA from the thighbone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Mar24.html

[CCTAU 3,494]

OK. We've seen the movie. Do we REALLY want to recreate these things? I mean, why recreate something that can go around eating us. I agree that it would help with over population in dense areas. But we cannot be assured it would only eat libruls.

[quietfan 233]

There's a world of difference between finding 70-yr-old DNA and 70-million-yr-old DNA.

For any of biologists out there: If, hypothetically, they did want to grow a thalycine (Tasmanian tiger) embryo, is there any living marsupial that's a close enough genetic match to serve as a surrogate uterus?

Of course, some crypto-zoologists would argue that the thalycine isn't extinct since reports of sightings continue to pop up occasionally.

[Tigermike 3,674]

There's a world of difference between finding 70-yr-old DNA and 70-million-yr-old DNA.

For any of biologists out there: If, hypothetically, they did want to grow a thalycine (Tasmanian tiger) embryo, is there any living marsupial that's a close enough genetic match to serve as a surrogate uterus?

Of course, some crypto-zoologists would argue that the thalycine isn't extinct since reports of sightings continue to pop up occasionally.

My ex!

[lca408 380]

There's a world of difference between finding 70-yr-old DNA and 70-million-yr-old DNA.

For any of biologists out there: If, hypothetically, they did want to grow a thalycine (Tasmanian tiger) embryo, is there any living marsupial that's a close enough genetic match to serve as a surrogate uterus?

Of course, some crypto-zoologists would argue that the thalycine isn't extinct since reports of sightings continue to pop up occasionally.

True, there have been sightings on a somewhat regular basis. Perhaps its a mutation.

Dinosaur DNA is going to be the toughest to extract. There are several hypothetical ways, the most feasible of which would be to find soft tissue, or in some cases grind up the bones and extract what you can. Either way, 65 million year old DNA, from whatever source is going to have massive sequence gaps. The movie touched the tip of the iceberg.

In the book, Crichton explores the problems with the dinosaurs, not just the spontaneous breeding, but their physiology, their characteristics, etc. Just using frog DNA is a horrible solution to filling these gaps. The result was that the dinosaurs were abnormal, even though most people couldn't tell the difference. I'm sure a real life situation would be even worse.

At the very least, we're many decades away from finding a way to extract a DNA strand that could even have any semblance to being a real dinosaur. I guess for the time being, we should be content to watch the birds.

Ryan