2023-09-29 06:00:14
In an impressive scientific breakthrough, researchers have managed to isolate and sequence RNA molecules more than a century old from a Tasmanian tiger specimen preserved at room temperature in a museum. This feat opens the way to the reconstitution of the transcriptomes of the skin (The skin is an organ composed of several layers of tissue. It plays, among other things, the…) and the skeletal muscles of a species (In the sciences of alive, the species (from the Latin species, “type”…) extinct, a world first.
Image of the Tasmanian tiger specimen used in the study, preserved in the Swedish National History Museum in Stockholm.
Crédit: Emilio Mármol Sánchez (photographie) et Panagiotis Kalogeropoulos (montage)
The Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, was an exceptional carnivorous marsupial that became extinct in 1936. Once found across the continent (The word continent comes from the Latin continere for “to hold together”, or continens…) Australian and the island of Tasmania, the species was decimated following colonization European, in particular because of the bounties offered for its capture (A capture, in the field of astronautics, is a process by which a celestial object, which…).
The study was led by Emilio Mármol and colleagues, in collaboration with the Center for Paleogenetics and the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Researchers sequenced the transcriptome of the skin and skeletal muscles of a 130-year-old Tasmanian tiger specimen. The recovered transcriptomes were of such remarkable quality that they identified tissue-specific gene expression signatures that resemble those of modern-day marsupial and placental mammals.
The findings have significant implications for international efforts to resurrect extinct species, including the Tasmanian tiger and woolly mammoth. Marc R. Friedländer, associate professor at the University of Stockholm, emphasizes the importance of this work, saying it offers a first glimpse of the existence of regulatory genes specific to thylacine, such as microRNAs, which disappeared more of a century (A century is now a period of one hundred years. The word comes from the Latin saeculum, i, which…).
Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genomics, suggests that this work might also be useful for studying the genomes of RNA viruses like SARS. -CoV-2 (COVID-19) and their evolutionary precursors present in museum collections.
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#time #RNA #extinct #species #isolated #sequenced
