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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

resurrection

  • Mailbag: Back-breeding aurochsen

    Thu, 2010-01-21 10:26 -- John Hawks

    Re: "Back-breeding aurochsen":

    There is old phrase "if it looks like an duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck".

    But no-one's back crossed ducks yet. So perhaps we need "if it looks like an aurochs and moos like a aurochs then it is a back-bred bovine that looks and sounds like an aurochs".

    I suppose there's some sense in which they're ecologically equivalent. Like if we backbred mammoths and they started acting as seed dispersers for Osage orange trees!

    MORE (2010-01-22):

    The way I understand it is that they are trying to breed back down lines. I thought that this was a discredited theory e.g. you cannot get a wolf from dogs (although that may be because dogs did not descend from wolves). You can get a dog that looks like a wolf but you cannot get a wolf (although you could get a pretty wolfish dog like a Husky).

    They'll probably get the same result with the Heck cattle but I am willing to bet nearly any amount that they will not breed the same temperament into their aurochs. It would be just too dangerous. From all accounts they were hell on wheels and noted for their evil tempers.

    The question is what's a wolf? If you can't define it independent of its particular history, then you're right -- you've defined away the opportunity to make wolves out of anything else, even the descendants of former wolves.

    If a wolf is defined in terms of its interactions with other things -- other species, ecology, whatever -- then if you have plugs for the right sockets, you've got a wolf. It's fair to ask whether this simulacrum of a wolf is really worth making. We could, while we're at it, make something *better* than a wolf, or an aurochs.

    In the latter case, I assume *better* would mean *tastier* and *less likely to gore random hikers*!

    Tags: 
    resurrection
    extinction

  • Back-breeding aurochsen

    Wed, 2010-01-20 22:52 -- John Hawks

    I was just talking in class today about how people want to back-breed aurochsen out of extinction. Here's a new story about the idea, from the Telegraph:

    "We were able to analyse auroch DNA from preserved bone material and create a rough map of its genome that should allow us to breed animals nearly identical to aurochs," said team leader Donato Matassino, head of the Consortium for Experimental Biotechnology in Benevento, in the southern Campania region.

    "We've already made our first round of crosses between three breeds native to Britain, Spain and Italy. Now we just have to wait and see how the calves turn out."

    I noted the idea last year:

    But I wouldn't rule out the possibility of back-breeding the genetics to look reasonably like some wild aurochsen. Old breeds were selected for diverse things, but most of this selection would have used standing variation initially. Few new mutations would have fixed in the time since domestication, and if one fixed in a single breed, it would have been unlikely to have been introduced into other old breeds until recently.

    Tags: 
    cattle
    extinction
    ancient DNA
    resurrection

  • Bringing back the overkill

    Sat, 2009-01-10 23:23 -- John Hawks

    New Scientist has a primer on extinct animals that might be candidates for resurrection by cloning. My preference is the short-faced bear:

    This towering beast would dwarf the world's largest living land carnivore, the polar bear. The short-faced bear may have been a third taller than the polar bear when standing upright, and it weighed up to a tonne. Recovering its DNA should be possible as there are specimens encased in permafrost. The short-faced's closest living relative is the spectacled bear of South America. The two species parted evolutionary company only around 5 million years ago, but unfortunately, at just a tenth the body mass of the short-faced bear, the spectacled bear is unlikely to be a particularly good surrogate.

    Or, OH OH, the giant beaver:

    There is fierce controversy over the reintroduction of normal beavers in some countries, so imagine how much fuss there would be over the reintroduction of the 2.5-metre-long giant beaver to North America. It's not too much to hope for a genome sequence of this massive rodent, says Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. The capybara, which is about half the mass, would probably be the most suitable surrogate, though it might still be too distant a relative.

    It's too bad Paleocaster is too old -- their spiral burrows ("devil's corkscrews") are totally cool.

    The article ends on the depressing note that the first resurrected species will likely be one that is now living -- gorillas are the example mentioned. Since the cloning of the gaur, that scenario seems pretty likely.

    Tags: 
    megafauna
    cloning
    resurrection
    biotech

  • Mailbag: Resurrect extinct species?

    Mon, 2008-12-22 10:35 -- John Hawks

    In today's mail, this question:

    Stupid question that I wish you would address: Are the tissue samples left from recently extinct species such as the Auroch, passenger pigeon, moa, dodo etc etc of sufficient quality to use it to resurrect the species? I would much rather see an Auroch than a pet cat cloned. Of course a wooly mammoth or Neanderthal would be even more interesting but also more problematic.

    My reply:

    It seems that those pursuing the idea of such resurrection are more interested in constructing artificial chromosomes. Once the technology is sufficient to do that, all you need is a genome sequence of the extinct organism and a suitable (closely related) host species to carry the pregnancy—of course with the attendant possible problems of immunocompatibility, etc.

    So, the barrier now is not the amount of tissue or the availability of genomic data, both of which seem to be sufficient for any recently extinct organism.

    I also mentioned the topic last month, after the NY Times carried an article about mammoth cloning. The idea raised there by George Church (which he thought would "alarm a minimal number of people" was constructing a Neandertal genome from a chimpanzee prototype. Is he imagining that people aren't ooked out by a Neandertal baby C-sectioned from a female chimpanzee?

    OK, so I'm ooked out. Meanwhile, I think you're going to want to construct a diploid genome, not two identical ones, because there are going to be some recessive lethals in there. So it takes more knowledge of variation than a single genome, and ideally quite a bit more. That's a limit too.

    Tags: 
    resurrection
    conservation
    metagenomics
    mailbag
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Neandertals

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Malapa

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