Efforts to bring the extinct passenger pigeon back from the dead are heating up, Wired's Kelly Servick says today in a story following Ben Novak, a 26-year-old genetics student who she writes has "put his graduate studies on hold to pursue a goal he'd once described in a junior high school fair presentation: de-extinction."
According to Servick, Novak's pigeon-philia has been recognized with an appointment as coordinator for this first subject case in a larger project to raise the dead of many extinct species from Revive and Restore, led by Ryan Phelan, who founded the DTC genetic company DNA Direct in 2005.
The company has convened a team of scientists to work through the challenge of rebuilding a passenger pigeon from the slime left in museum specimens and the architecture of close pigeon relatives, and is hosting a TEDx talk today to discuss the project, featuring field heavyweight George Church among many others.
According to Wired, Novak's plan hinges on sequencing available fragments of the genome of the passenger pigeon and comparing them to the genome of its cousin, the band-tailed pigeon.
"The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums' passenger pigeons don't overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order," Servick writes.
Novak sent requests to 30 museums before receiving a passenger pigeon tissue sample from Chicago's Field Museum in 2011 and used a borrowed $2,500 to pay for it to be sequenced, according to Servick. Now working with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Novak hopes to complete full sequences of the passenger and band-tailed pigeon genomes within a year.
But the project could really get dicey, Servick says. According to Shapiro, "because the last common ancestor of the two species flew about 30 million years ago, their genomes will likely differ at millions of locations." Fitting the pieces together will be grueling, if not impossible
Then Novak will have to break the even more stalwart barrier of actually modifying the genome of the band-tailed pigeon to match that of the carrier pigeon and bringing it to life implanted in another bird's egg.
Assuming all this actually works out, Servick says Novak eventually hopes to set up a "sanctuary of lab-generated pigeon chicks in the bird's original breeding territory."
Sequencing the complete
Sequencing the complete genome of the passenger pigeon will be relatively straightforward if sufficient tissue samples can be procured, but the site-directed mutagenesis of the genome of a living pigeon relative to convert it into a passenger pigeon is just too expensive and time-consuming to be worthwhile.
The restoration of extinct life forms raises even deeper ethical issues. Over 99% of the species that have graced our planet have come and gone as part of the natural evolutionary process. However, in recent times primarily due to human activity as much as 40% of the estimated 10 million species living today are facing potential extinction. Human decimation of the wild habitat on land and over-fishing and pollution of the oceans and lakes has apparently increased the natural rate of species extinction in the order of 500-fold. Careful consideration needs to be given as to which species should be re-incarnated and whether this should be undertaken at all. Perhaps it would be better to focus on taking better care of the species that are on the brink of extinction but still here.
To contemplate rehabilitation of ecosystems, keystone species would probably have to be given priority. Interestingly, this is likely to be predators as these maintain the balance in nature to weed out the sick and weak and prevent over-grazing. The passenger pigeon, sadly, would not be a very strong contender.
In response to the comment
In response to the comment above, as of today site directed mutagenesis of that many loci would be too difficult. However, in the future given the progress being made in oligo synthesis, I image we may one day be able to build the chromosomes of extinct species for their genome sequence if we have it. The hardest part I image will actually be getting the epigenetic states right. Birds may not have imprinting however, which could make this easier.
But honestly 10 years ago do you think people would imagine we could sequence a human genome for a few thousand dollars? Probably not. What is to say in another 10 years we won't be able to build a genome for just as little? Craig Venter's synthetic genome of 2010 was a every expensive undertaking, but not as expensive as the human genome project back in the early 2000's. Just look how far that technology has come.