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Originally Posted by suzzer99
Not to be a wet blanket, but my understanding is this is a grey wolf with 14 specific genes tweaked to match dire wolf DNA. It's unclear how close these guys are to an actual dire wolf.
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Yes, as with most scientific achievements, the media just has to sensationalize it to the point of borderline misinformation.
They used CRISPR to edit existing grey wolf DNA to mimic dire wolf DNA. Here's a quick explanation:
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To be crystal clear, Colossal’s scientists didn’t create these so-called dire wolves by directly copying DNA over from ancient samples. Instead, after reconstructing and analyzing the wolves’ genomes, they made precise edits to the DNA of existing cells taken from a gray wolf. They made 20 edits in total, 15 of which were intended to make genes resemble the variants found in their dire wolf samples.
It’s these variants, the company says, that make dire wolves truly distinct from wolves alive today. Some of these variants, they say, are thought to influence the wolves’ size and facial shape. The nucleus of these reconstructed cells was then transplanted into donor egg cells that had their nucleus scooped out, which gave rise to viable embryos that were implanted into surrogate mothers (large hound mixes).
For context, the gray wolf—the closest living relative of the dire wolf—has a genome of about 2.45 billion base pairs (the fundamental building blocks of DNA). Given that dire wolf DNA differs by roughly 0.5% from that of gray wolves, the researchers have barely scratched the surface. This 0.5% disparity amounts to roughly 12 million base pairs that set the dire wolf genome apart from its gray wolf counterpart. Accordingly—and not to minimize the achievement—Colossal remains very far from capturing the genetic differences between the two species.
https://gizmodo.com/in-a-historic-fi...-of-2000586007
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