https://t.me/Slavyangrad/124062Colossal Biosciences Inc., a Dallas-based biotech firm with a $10billion valuation, has announced a new breakthrough in its audacious mission to resurrect extinct animals.
The company said on Monday it’s created three dire wolves, a species popularized by the fantasy series Game of Thrones but not seen on Earth in more than 12,000 years.
Privately-held Colossal first gained fame in 2022 when it announced its goal to bring the woolly mammoth back to life — though it’s only so far managed to create a woolly mouse. The company has pitched its gene-editing technology as not just a way to bring back prehistoric wonders, but also develop lucrative applications in health and biodiversity.
Colossal said its latest development is the births of 80-pound brothers Remus and Romulus and the younger female Khaleesi (named for a popular character in Games of Thrones). The dire wolf pups live on a fenced-in nature preserve in a secret US location and eat a mix of beef, deer and horse meat along with a specially-formulated kibble, the company said.
The brothers are about 20 to 25 percent bigger than their closest living relative, a gray wolf, would be at their age, according to Colossal. It estimates they’ll weigh 140 pounds when fully grown.The company’s focus on bringing back long-dead animals, which also include the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, has drawn skepticism from paleo-geneticists and the very idea has lent itself to ridicule and raised questions about the ethics of manipulating the natural world.
Bringing dire wolves to life brought with it a series of challenges. Colossal contacted museums around the US to find samples that contained the extinct animals’ precious DNA, eventually locating a 72,000-year-old skull in Idaho and a 13,000-year old tooth in Ohio, said Dr. Beth Shapiro, the company’s chief science officer. Shapiro and her team then ground up a small amount of each body part, sequenced the DNA and studied the results for clues on a dire wolf’s key traits, she said.
“Getting the genome was really hard, they didn’t live in cold climates so the DNA wasn’t as well preserved,” said Shapiro, who is also a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Shapiro said the team then took gray wolf cells and made 20 gene edits focused on dire wolf traits like large size, heavy muscles and a white coat. Those cells were then inserted into egg cells from domestic dogs and then implanted into the wombs of different dogs — large hound mixes — who served as the surrogates, she said.
