Scientists from Stockholm University, the Arctic University of Norway, Lund University and Karolinska Institute have extracted, sequenced and analyzed historical RNA from muscle and skin tissue of a 130-year-old thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) preserved in desiccation at room temperature in a museum collection.
The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger or the marsupial wolf, was a carnivorous marsupial and the apex predator in Tasmania.
The species is one of only a few marsupials to have a pouch in both sexes.
The thylacine looked like an amalgam of several animals. It was the size and shape of a medium-to-large size dog, but had tiger-like stripes running down its lower back and an abdominal pouch.
The fossil record shows that the thylacine appeared about 4 million years ago in Australia. By the 20th century it was extinct, or extremely rare, on the mainland but was still found in Tasmania, the island state off Australia’s southern coast.
The thylacine’s demise can be directly attributed to the bounty scheme in place from 1830-1914 that resulted in the killing of several thousand animals and indirectly to the loss of its habitat from farming activity.
The last known thylacine died in 1936, in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, and little is known about the species’ natural behavior.
Recent efforts in de-extinction have focused on the thylacine, as its natural habitat in Tasmania is still mostly preserved, and its reintroduction could help recovering past ecosystem equilibriums lost after its final disappearance.
However, reconstructing a functional living thylacine not only requires a comprehensive knowledge of its genome (DNA), but also of tissue-specific gene expression dynamics and how gene regulation worked, which are only attainable by studying its transcriptome (RNA).
“Resurrecting the thylacine or the woolly mammoth is not a trivial task, and will require a deep knowledge of both the genome and transcriptome regulation of such…
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