A female passenger pigeonWIKIMEDIAOnce abundant in North America, the passenger pigeon had been hunted out of existence by 1914, when the last of its kind—Martha—died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Now, a group of scientists are planning to use DNA extracted from museum specimens like Martha to bring the passenger pigeon back to life, reported Wired Science.
Working for an organization called Revive and Restore, which seeks to encourage practical attempts at de-extinction, Ben Novak, a former technician at the Ancient DNA Center at McMaster University in Canada, is collaborating with Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and George Church at Harvard to try to revive the extinct pigeon. First, Novak and Shapiro plan to sequence the genome of the passenger pigeon and compare it to that of the bird’s closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, to pick out the most important variations.
Armed with those data, Church’s lab plans to edit the genome from the germ cell of a band-tailed pigeon to transform it into that of a passenger pigeon. Then, using techniques pioneered at the Roslin Institute ...
