Lot's Wife Edition 1 2016

SCIENCE
The big screen
science of clones
and dinosaurs
by Chris Allen
In 2015, the film and television industry
renewed its love for cloning and genetic
modification. This was best shown in
the success of the dinosaur adventure,
Jurassic World. But just how accurate are
these blockbuster portrayals of science?
Jurassic World
How were the dinosaurs in the Jurassic film universe
rescued from extinction? All the answers, it seems,
are to be found in the first instalment of the
franchise, Jurassic Park. A short welcome video on
Jurassic Park informs the film’s protagonists that
the genetic information required for cloning was
discovered in prehistoric mosquitoes that had been
preserved in tree sap. It just so happens that the
mozzies fed upon sweet dinosaur blood, millions and
millions of years ago. That sounds pretty exciting and
plausible, but, unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen
in the real world.
Attempts to find preserved, ancient DNA in
insects has not been successful. First of all, the
Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which took
away our dinosaurs, occurred sixty-six million years
before present day. Good luck finding any bugs that
old, still floating around in tree sap.
Second, in studies of much more modern
insects, the DNA fragments to be found are short in
length. This was shown in 2013, when a preserved
bee that could not have been older than sixty
was sequenced. This study used next-generation
genetic methods, such as the quick and accurate
sequencing technique, Roche 454. Researchers
could only express low confidence in their DNA
matches with microfloral DNA and bee mitochondria
DNA. The Jurassic insect method is highly unlikely.
Why dream of a Jurassic World dinosaur,
when scientists haven’t even resurrected a Woolly
Mammoth yet? The Mammoth only became extinct
in the relatively recent Pleistocene epoch. An
indirect cloning breakthrough occurred last year,
when Current Biology published a conservation
research study sequencing the Mammoth’s whole
genome. While an explicable concern for the safety
of elephant surrogate mothers will probably prevent
further developments, cloning a Mammoth is far
more achievable than a Tyrannosaurus rex.
If you disregard everything I’ve just said about
dinosaurs being an unrealistic goal, and pretend
a plethora of dinosaur genomes are in human
possession, would it be possible for scientists to
engineer a genetic hybrid as whacked up as the
film’s villainous Indominus rex?
For the uninitiated, the Indominus is a
smooshing together of the Tyrannosaurus rex
genome with a few, choice species that include a
Velociraptor species, a Tree frog, a cuttlefish and
a pit viper. The film’s scientists mention ‘advances
in gene splicing’ as the key to breeding hybrids.
However, cutting up genes is not really a barrier to
creating monster hybrids, thanks to all the natural
cut sites in a genome. An expected barrier would be
manipulating these distantly-related genomes into
a transgenic organism that will survive development
- this seems particularly challenging while there are
no extant dinosaurs to guide experimentation.
There is some good news on the hybrid
modification front. Many experiments have been
successful in taking a single or a few known genes
interest from one species to another. Researchers
have created transgenic organisms as strange as
glowing, fluro-green kittens, and as ground-breaking
as pigs with organs to be used in human organ
transplants. Perhaps an Indominus rex isn’t that
radical after all.
Rating:
Lot’s Wife | 35