Tasmanian tiger hopes raised

SYDNEY - Australian scientists say they have made a breakthrough in efforts to clone the extinct Tasmanian tiger by replicating some of the animal's genes using DNA extracted from preserved male and female pups.

The scientists from the Australian Museum in Sydney say they hope to clone a Tasmanian tiger in 10 years if they succeed in constructing large quantities of all the genes of the Tasmanian tiger and sequencing sections of the genome to create a genetic library of Tasmanian tiger DNA.

"We are now further ahead than any other project that has attempted anything remotely similar using extinct DNA," said Mike Archer, director of the Australian Museum.

"What was once nothing more than an impossible dream has just taken another giant step closer to becoming a biological reality," he said, adding that the ultimate aim was to clone a viable reproducing population of Tasmanian tigers.

The Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) was a dog-like carnivorous marsupial with stripes on its back that originally roamed Australia and Papua New Guinea, but sometime between 2000 and 200 years ago disappeared from the Australian mainland, only to be found in Tasmania.

It took white settlers only some 70 years to make the Tasmanian tiger extinct. The last known tiger died in 1936 and it was declared extinct in 1986.

The project to bring it back from extinction began in 1999 when Australian Museum scientists extracted DNA from an ethanol-preserved female pup in its collection.

In 2001, further DNA was extracted from two other preserved pups - the tissue source for this DNA was bone, tooth, bone marrow and dried muscle.

Archer said the alcohol-preserved female pup's DNA had given scientists the Tasmanian tiger's X chromosome and the other samples the male Y chromosome.

Archer said that if the museum was successful it would seek to clone a viable population of Tasmanian tigers, using the Tasmanian devil, another carnivorous marsupial, as a host.

The technology for the final stage of cloning, putting the Tasmanian tiger's genetic material into a Tasmanian devil host cell which has been stripped of the devil's genetic material, was still to be developed.

"The tiger is an iconic Australian animal, woven in a complex web of guilt because Australians made it extinct. We need to lift this burden of guilt."

- REUTERS

Feature: Cloning

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