26 chicks (ranging from a few days to a few months old) were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimicked eggshells.
NEW YORK – A BIOTECHNOLOGY COMPANY Designed to resurrect lost creatures The company said on Tuesday it had hatched live chicks in artificial conditions, a development that has received mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its anti-extinction mission.
According to Colossal Biosciences, 26 chicks (ranging from a few days to a few months old) were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimics eggshells.
Colossal previously announced that it has genetically modified living animals to resemble extinct species, including hairy mouse like mammoths and wolf cubs Imitation of dire wolf.
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically modify live birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times the size of chickens and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.
“We want to build something that nature already does well and make it better, scalable, and even more efficient,” Ram said.
Independent scientists say the technology, while impressive, lacks some components that would truly qualify as an artificial egg. They say the idea of resurrecting the extinct beast may be impossible.
“They might be able to use this technology to help them make a genetically modified bird, but it’s just a genetically modified bird. It’s not a moa,” said Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo.
To hatch chicks, Colossal scientists pour fertilized eggs into an artificial system and place them in an incubator. They also added calcium normally absorbed from the eggshell and imaged the embryo’s development and growth in real time.
Scientists say Colossal designed an artificial eggshell with a membrane that lets in just the right amount of oxygen, just like a real egg. But other components of the egg – such as the temporary organs that form to nourish and stabilize the growing chick and remove waste – are not included.
“It’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” Lynch said.
Over the past few decades, researchers have used more primitive techniques to create transparent eggshells and hatch chicks in plastic films or bags. These techniques are useful for studying chicken development and gathering insights that could also be applied to other mammals and even humans.
“Growing chicks in artificial containers is not necessarily new,” says Nicola Hemmings, who studies avian reproductive biology at the University of Sheffield. Hemmings is not a member of the Colossal team.
There’s still a long way to go before Colossal attempts to resurrect a moa using this artificial egg system. Scientists first need to compare the ancient DNA in the well-preserved moa bones with the genomes of living birds. They need a bigger eggshell.
“We don’t want to wait until we’re ready to give birth to a giant moa. We actually want to start solving the engineering challenges of surrogacy and reproduction now,” Lamm said.
Even if Megabird succeeds in creating a tall bird similar to the moa, some scientists are still worried about what will happen next, including how it will survive in an environment that looks completely different from what it used to be.
“The big challenge is, what kind of environment is this animal going to live in?” said bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
Hemmings said such de-extinction efforts might make more sense for species currently on the brink of extinction, where scientists could preserve sperm and egg cells from living members to try to bring back more species.
“My personal interest is more in preserving what we have rather than trying to recover something that’s gone,” Hemings said.
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