SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – While the Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences project to bring back extinct species has been compared to “Jurassic Park”, it has started at a much smaller scale than a T. Rex: woolly mammoth mice.
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These are mice that have undergone gene editing “associated with hair morphology and lipid metabolism, enabling insights into traits involved in developing woolly hair and cold tolerance,” according to research from the company released this week.
Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal Labs and Biosciences, joined Audacy station KBCS Radio this week to discuss these woolly little creatures.
“I was really interested in learning whether they just spend a lot more time grooming themselves than regular mice because they really do have really long, curly, woolly hair, but the people who are working in the lab say they’re just like regular mice,” Shapiro said. “They’re just sitting around, chilling, running on their wheel, hiding under their little house. They’re just much cuter than a regular lab mouse.”
Creating cute, fuzzy mice might seem like an odd step on the journey to resurrect the woolly mammoth – large, cold weather mammals that thrived during the last ice age but died out around 4,000 years ago. Shapiro helped explain why the team tackled mice before going bigger.
“One of the hardest problems that we face on the path to making a mammoth is to figure out how different changes in the DNA map to the way an animal looks,” she said. “And so, we have to take an Asian elephant, the closest living relative of a mammoth, and turn it into a woolly elephant, if you will. And while we can try a lot of different things in culture, in the lab, sometimes it’s nice to have a whole animal model so we can make these edits and see did that change actually make it woollier? And in the case of the mouse, the answer is yes.”
One of the main goals of the Colossal project is to re-establish missing parts of lost ecosystems, such as the ones inhabited by woolly mammoths thousands of years ago, Shaprio added. That might not look exactly like those mammoths from the past, but like modern, cold-tolerant elephants.
“Every species that is a candidate for de-extinction faces a different set of technical and ethical and ecological challenges, and as we solve them – the tools that we develop, the protocols we develop, the collaborations we bring together – can immediately be applied to helping living species avoid extinction,” she said, adding that more than 50% of species right now are threatened with extinction.
So, lab mice with “exaggerated hair phenotypes including curly, textured coats, and golden-brown hair,” could be a step towards saving other species. This work might also help develop solutions to help species become resistance to disease and to reintroduce genetic diversity as our planet is quickly changing.
“We’re not claiming that this is a technology that should be used instead of traditional conservation,” Shapiro stressed. “But it should be something that we think about using in addition to traditional approaches.”
As for the comparisons to “Jurassic Park” – she’s happy it’s getting people’s attention and making them think about the extinction crisis.
“I think it’s good news and the woolly mouse are just an adorable little manifestation of that positivity,” Shapiro said.
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