We will never be able to resurrect extinct species such as the woolly mammoth exactly as they were because of the difficulty of recreating key genes.
In the case of the Christmas Island rat – also known as Maclear’s rat – which went extinct in the early 20th century, the team was able to reassemble most of the pieces by using the genome of the related Norway brown rat“Every bit of DNA that we could recover, we got,” he says. “There’s a 5 per cent fraction we can’t make sense of.”
In other words, the most important pieces of the puzzle are the parts that can’t be put back together, because those parts of the guide picture have been lost. However, many other genes, including those involved in the rat’s immune system and its sense of smell, could only be partially reconstructed. Smell plays a key role in behaviours such as finding food, avoiding predators and choosing mates, says Gilbert, so any recreated Christmas Island rat might behave very differently to the original species.He has no plans to try to resurrect the Christmas Island rat. The team studied it only as a way of exploring what is possible.
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