Biologists, perhaps inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, want to bring an extinct species back to life. But we are not talking about some colossal dinosaur that “ruled the Earth millions of years ago”, but about a small, endemic bird lived in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean until the end of the 17th century: the famous dodo.

No other bird is as inextricably linked to the concept of extinction as the dodo. He was a strange flightless bird and lived without problems until foreign sailors arrived on his island, unwittingly bringing rats with them. Rodents and the love of foreigners for hunting led to the extinction of the dodo in just a few decades.

Now a team of scientists wants to bring the dodo back to life by combining ancient DNA mapping with gene-editing technology and synthetic biology. They hope the project will open up new ways to protect birds.

“We are clearly in the midst of a species extinction crisis,” says Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And we have an obligation to spread the stories and inspire people in a way that makes them think about this crisis.”

The return of the dodo and the mammoth

Shapiro is the head of Colossal Biosciences. It is a biotech and genetic engineering startup founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lam and Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church. Their company undertook another equally ambitious project to bring back two other extinct species: the mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger.

Shapiro says she has already completed the first, key step towards resurrecting the dodo: the complete genome sequencing of the dodo from ancient DNA, based on genetic material recovered from the remains of the dodo in Denmark.

The next step is to compare the genetic information of this specimen with the “closest relatives” of the dodo in the pigeon family – the Nicobar pigeon (such birds still live) and the now extinct giant winged pigeon Pezophaps solitaria, which once lived on the island. near Mauritius. This process will allow scientists to figure out which mutations in the genome “make dodo… dodo,” Shapiro explains.

Problems for the “resurrection” of the dodo

However, “programming” the cells of a living “relative” of the dodo with the DNA of an extinct bird would be a very difficult, if not impossible, process. Shapiro hopes to adapt to his designs a technique already used with stem cells, which are the embryonic precursors of sperm and eggs. This technique has already been used to create a duck father chick.

This method involves removing stem cells from the egg, growing them in the lab, and editing the cells with the desired genetic characteristics before reintroducing them into the egg at the same developmental stage.