Chickens could bring the dodo back with help of Jurassic Park-style science

Telegraph

21-02-2025

The dodo, the passenger pigeon and the Californian condor are either extinct or heading swiftly towards oblivion.
But a new project is hoping to use the humble chicken to revive these birds' fortunes with Jurassic Park-style science.
Dr Anna Berenson, a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Langone, has started a five-year project to perfect the process of creating one bird species from a close relative.
Her work will take the domesticated chicken and insert DNA from a wild cousin in an attempt to allow a regular farmyard chicken to give birth to a wild chicken.
In the future, however, it could also be used to bring animals back from extinction and save the most endangered species in the world.
Chickens are the proof of concept for the science which could be applied to any other species once mastered.
The technique involves growing a white leghorn domestic chicken embryo and extracting cells from it that will go on to become the sperm or eggs.
The DNA of these cells will be altered and have chunks of genetic code inserted from the red junglefowl wild chicken in a process that involves taking the shell off the top of a live egg before injecting DNA and sealing it shut with scotch tape.
These cells will then be matured before being injected into another regular domesticated chicken, which will act as a surrogate.
The bird will be unremarkable and look identical to all other domestic chickens, but the chicks that hatch from its eggs will be completely different and should resemble a wild bird.
'It will have the flashy features - the leg colour, the feather colour,' Dr Berenson said.
It will also act like a wild chicken, she believes, with its genes imbuing wild-like behavioural traits as well as physical ones.
'To truly rewild something you have to go after not just those superficial things, but also the behavioural,' she said.
The scientists are trying to change four key genes which control obvious features including feather colour, leg colour, time for a chick to hatch from an egg, and the style of facial adornments.
'Our goal here is to identify which DNA regions are most important for us to swap out, and then to swap out certain combinations of these regions to generate a bird that essentially resembles the wild bird,' Dr Berenson said.
'Our hope is that by successfully rewilding the domestic chicken, we'll demonstrate our ability to use large-scale genome engineering methods to make major phenotypic changes in birds.
'This will hopefully open up avenues for restoring at-risk bird populations by improving their genetic resistance to certain environmental challenges, and maybe even avenues for reviving lost bird species.'
Dr Berenson expects to have created a wild chicken from normal chicken genes by the end of her research project. The work started in July and is at an early stage, with current goals focusing on perfecting which chunks of DNA need to be extracted and tweaked.
'I'm very much working on the cells in a dish currently but the genome engineering part seems to be going well so far,' she told reporters.
'The next phase would be to try and use those cells to make the chickens that have those genome edits.
'The whole point of the chicken thing is as a proof of concept for our technique.
'The chicken is basically just a place for us to start playing with bird cells and then the idea is that once we've done that, we can start applying that to kind of lesser-known, or more difficult bird species, which are the ones that we are actually concerned about.'
The first bird to benefit from the chicken work will most likely be the passenger pigeon, which once existed in the billions in the US before being hunted to extinction by 1914.
The bird was so plentiful in the Americas that it is reported to have taken entire days for their flocks to pass by, with them blotting out the sky and creating a draught on the ground below.
'In theory, we could use their living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, and introduce key regions from the passenger pigeon genome to essentially re-establish populations of birds that resemble the passenger pigeon,' Dr Berenson said.
Reviving the dodo, she says, is also something she hopes to work on.
However, Dr Berenson's ambition is to use her work to save animals from extinction, which is a better fate for a species than trying to bring it back once it has vanished.
'The bird species of most interest is the California condor which is extremely reduced,' she said. There is thought to be around 500 of these in the world, with almost half in captivity.
'They're so ugly that they're cute, especially the baby ones, they really look like dinosaurs. That's my current goal.'