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About the two rhinos, do we have the technology to keep genetic material from animals that are endangered so we can reintroduce them later? I realize the popula
by StavrosK 6y ago
About the two rhinos, do we have the technology to keep genetic material from animals that are endangered so we can reintroduce them later? I realize the population would be too much of a monoculture, but maybe it's better than nothing.
- conception 6y agoWe do and use it! SD zoo just made a horse! https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewalskis-horse-is-born-of-dna-saved-for-40-years https://www.cbs58.com/news/a-clone-of-the-endangered-przewal...
- StavrosK 6y agoThat's exciting news, thanks!
- DavidAdams 6y agoI wonder if CRISPR tech could mitigate some of the dangers of inbreeding.
- bioinformatics 6y agoIt won't.
- lilboiluvr69 6y agoCan somebody talk more about this? I'm interested and don't know much about it.
- ses1984 6y agoI am a lay person so please don't just trust what I'm saying, but don't think you need to be an expert in the field to deduce why it won't happen. First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter. Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.
- bioinformatics 6y agoYou are in the right track. To actually make CRISPR/CAS-9 work for "reduce inbreeding" issues, we would need to understand how the whole animal genome operates and all possible connections between genes and define what are the recessive genes that might cause some anomaly in the selection coefficient and decrease it. Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?