The de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences says it has developed a key technology for bringing back [extinct birds and rescuing endangered ones: an artificial egg.
The device — a 3D-printed lattice shell that protects a transparent silicon membrane — has ‘hatched’ around two dozen chicken and quail. Colossal, based in Dallas, Texas, hopes to use the technology to resurrect the extinct South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus), a 3-metre-tall New Zealand bird that laid eggs the length of a rugby ball.
To my surprise, it’s not the first attempt at chickens without eggs:
Researchers have been working for decades to hatch birds from artificial eggs. The first successful report was in 1998 using quail embryos. Researchers transferred the contents of natural, fertilized eggs into glass vessels after incubating them for two daya.
Later efforts introduced transparent plastic cups to track development, and transferred embryos to artificial eggs immediately after they had been laid, says Yutaka Tahara, a teacher at Oihama High School in Chiba, Japan, who conducted some of the work.
Tahara, who hatches chicks from artificial eggs with his students, says the main advance of Colossal’s artificial egg seems to be the membrane the company has created, which enables chick development at atmospheric levels of oxygen. The artificial eggs he and others have made, by contrast, require high levels of supplemental oxygen as hatching approaches.
No idea about the usefulness of this, but…cooool!!!
Unfortunately probably never, we simply can’t get dinosaur DNA in any usable form and still don’t understand what in frogs’ (for example, as the book said frog DNA was used to patch missing sequences in dinosaur DNA) DNA makes frogs frogs and not something else.
The common statement that chimps and human share 99% of their DNA was recently challenged, when it was found that non-coding sequences can be 12-13% different. There’s too much we don’t understand yet.
The research and development road going in a certain direction often creates solutions and products for unexpected stuff (think every-day surgical advances borne out of battlefield triage, or even “velcro” from the space industry).
I bet that membrane that they developed to maintain atmospheric integrity would be an interesting product for further development.
Didn’t some genrticists tinker around with chickens and activated long dormant dna and surpressed modern traits to get chickrns with distinct dinosaur features, lile a tail, teeth and a snout instead of a beak?
It wss said that they would have been perfectly able to live normal dino lives.
Officially they never let the embryos hatch, unofficially… who knows.
I was reading on the train this morning. Chickens are quite useful in biomedicine, vaccine production, protein factories and further experiments. So, this crazy thing may support all this work.
Yes, but that was - to my knowledge- still fully chicken DNA. The T-Rex was closest to the modern chicken, as my building’s lift keeps reminding me, but that experiment is still miles away from anything close to a dinosaur.
In a lecture by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz I recall her saying that our understanding of developmental genetics is still of a “give a radio to a pack of apes, they smash it and conclude that it no longer plays music” level
