Gene editing technologies, such as those used in agriculture and de-extinction efforts, can be repurposed to provide what an international team of scientists describes as a breakthrough approach for restoring genetic variety and rescuing endangered species.
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“We’re facing the fastest environmental change in Earth’s history, and many species have lost the genetic variation needed to adapt and survive,” said Prof van Oosterhout. “Gene engineering provides a way to restore that variation, whether it’s reintroducing DNA variation that has been lost from immune-system genes that we can retrieve from museum specimens or borrowing climate-tolerance genes from closely related species.”
One example of this is the pink pigeon, whose population has been brought back from the brink of extinction … by decades of captive-breeding and reintroduction efforts in Mauritius.
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[D}espite its recovery, it continues to experience substantial genomic erosion and is likely to go extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. The next challenge is to restore the genetic diversity it has lost, enabling it to adapt to future environmental change – genome engineering could make this possible.
