The Christmas Island rat could give scientists insight into the possibility of bringing back a woolly mammoth.
“You can only bring back what you can find. And our point is we can’t find everything,” says Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen.
With an intact copy of the original book, someone could theoretically reconstruct the book perfectly. When identifying a reference genome, researchers look for a species that diverged evolutionarily from the extinct species fairly recently — in other words, a very similar book. The genomes will match closely, but not perfectly.
What’s more, the missing genes weren’t random. They tended to fall within two main regions that controlled the rat’s immune responses and sense of smell. So, if a Norway brown rat’s genome was edited to resemble the Christmas Island rat, the new critter would smell in a different way than its prototype did. This could hinder a proxy Christmas Island rat’s chance at survival if it were released into its former habitat.
Despite the hurdles, using the technology to bring back species is still worth doing, says Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore, a nonprofit that uses genetic engineering for conservation projects. He plans to apply Gilbert and colleagues’ analysis to his own work on the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914.
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