Rhino fi

rhino fi

Gene editing for de-extinction To achieve its goal, the company essentially created a hybrid genome using CRISPR technology to cut away certain gray wolf gene variants and replace them with traits associated with dire wolves, said Love Dalén, a professor in evolutionary genomics based at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University, and an adviser to Colossal. rhino fi “There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% gray wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question,” Dalén said.

“It carries dire wolf genes, and these genes make it look more like a dire wolf than anything we’ve seen in the last 13,000 years. And that is very cool.”

Dalén, who said he had been “a little bit” involved in the analysis of the dire wolf genomes but had not personally met the dire wolf pups or been involved in the gene editing or cloning process, said the work by the scientists was a “huge leap” from anything done in the field in the past.

“The way I see this is that they have resurrected the dire wolf phenotype (the observable traits of a species) and we know from the genome that they probably looked a bit like these puppies. To me, it’s a dire wolf in that sense,” he said.