Year of the dodo in ’24?
Scientists around the world are working to revive ancient ice-capsulated cells to find new sources of lifesaving medicine and possibly bring back long-extinct species like the dodo bird.
The science, called resurrection biology, has made immense progress over the past year as researchers turn to the past for solutions for the future, CNN reported.
While the scientists aren’t looking to bring back dinosaurs à la “Jurassic Park” — although some have goals to resurrect lost plant and animal species — they hope studying prehistoric cells can reveal new sources for drugs as well as ways to thwart dangerous long-dormant pathogens.
The research also offers a look at human history and how our ancestors lived and died thousands of years ago.
Jean-Michel Claverie, a professor emeritus of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in Marseille, France, has been identifying possible “zombie viruses” lurking in the permafrost of Siberia.
Viruses that have been buried for tens of thousands of years could come back and potentially devastate life on Earth as global temperatures rise and ice melts.
In 2014, Claverie isolated a virus found in the permafrost and revived it by inserting it into cultured cells, making it infectious for the first time in 30,000 years.
This past February, Claverie and his team isolated strains of an ancient virus from samples of soil representing five new families of previously unknown viruses. They only infected single-cell organisms with the virus in their research as a safety precaution. The samples dated between 48,500 and 27,000 years old.
Meanwhile, startup Colossal Biosciences announced this year its plan to revive the dodo — a flightless bird that has been extinct since the 17th century — and reintroduce it to its natural habitat on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
The scientists aim to use cells with genetic material from the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, that can grow successfully in a chicken embryo.