(Tasmanian Tiger – photo credit www.bbc.co.uk/news)
Using transgenic mice, Australian and American researchers have shown that they can “resurrect” a snippet of DNA from the genome of an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger — and test its biological function in a living animal.   The last Tasmanian Tiger died in an Australian zoo in 1936 having been hunted to extinction.
Dr Andrew Pask, of the Department of Zoology at Melbourne University, who led the research, said it was the first time that DNA from an extinct species had been used to carry out a function in a living organism.
“As more and more …read more