Read more about our portfolio company, Colossal Biosciences.
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By Jeffrey Kluger, Editor at Large
It’s been 226 years since humans last beheld a bluebuck—and we don’t know what we’ve been missing. The bluebuck was a species of antelope, but an especially elegant one—a trim, fleet beast, measuring about 4 ft. tall at the shoulders and 10 ft. from nose to rump, with long, sharp, backward curved horns measuring 22 inches from skull to point. Its belly was white and its face was brown, but the rest of the animal’s body was covered in a singular gray-blue coat. When it ran at its peak velocity of 50 miles per hour it resembled nothing so much as a speeding streak of pale blue sky.
That blue pelt was irresistible to the European colonists who poured into the bluebuck’s native South Africa, and it took them only about 150 years—from 1650 to 1800—to hunt the animal to extinction. Today the bluebuck exists only in drawings from the naturalists who saw it while it lived, and in stray specimens in science museums. Now, however, the bluebuck may be on its way back, thanks to Colossal Biosciences, the company that last spring made headlines with the news that it had de-extincted the dire wolf, which last walked the Earth more than 10,000 years ago and now prowls again in the form three young snow-white canids produced by editing the genome of a common gray wolf to express the traits of its dire wolf cousin. The company is also working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the moa. Today it announced that the bluebuck would join that lost menagerie.
“African antelopes have long been neglected in global conservation,” said Beth Shapiro, chief science officer of Colossal, in a statement. “The bluebuck de-extinction project changes that. We’re bringing back a species that played a vital role in its ecosystem, and building the scientific foundation for antelope conservation before more of its relatives are lost.”
The need is urgent. Of the 90 antelope species in the world, 55 are experiencing declining populations and 29 of those are threatened with extinction. Colossal’s goal is not only to bring the bluebuck back, but to use the genetic techniques it masters in those efforts to fortify existing endangered populations.
Colossal researchers will do their work by first sequencing the genome of both a bluebuck and its close surviving relative, the roan antelope, looking for the differences that distinguish one species from the other. The roan cells are easy enough to collect—plenty of the animals are at large in sub-Saharan Africa in the west, central, and eastern parts of the continent. The bluebuck is another matter. To obtain the species’ DNA, Colossal researchers borrowed a tissue specimen from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and then conducted what is known as 40-fold coverage of the genome—sequencing each base pair 40 times to ensure genetic accuracy. The key spots on the genome that separate the lost bluebuck from the extant roan are unknown but they can be surprisingly few. For the dire wolf, the Colossal team had to make just 20 edits on 14 genes to give a gray wolf the dire wolf’s white coat, larger size, more powerful bite, more robust fat distribution, and other key traits.
Read the full article on TIME.
