A team of researchers managed to isolate and sequence century-old RNA from the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.
  • psud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    152·
    1 year ago

    From a thylacine, which went extinct in the 20th century, which we have video of while it was alive

    It’s important, but not spelling out which species in the title is a bit misleading

  • Klicnik@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    This is the first time I saw Gizmodo without an ad blocker. My gosh, there’s more ads than content. I think my cell phone got cancer from that page.

    • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I was just about to mention how miserable the experience is on mobile. A minute into reading and I got a totally cool full-fucking-screen ad for some star trek thing I don’t care about.

      I know it’s slightly unfair to complain about something I didn’t pay a cent to access, but practices like that are downright insulting to me as a reader, similar to how some sites trap you into their related articles list after you press the back button. That shit has got to be illegal, but if they must do that, they should at least save it for “articles” about the latest politician getting “slammed” or “blasted”, with a single tweet as their source. Let me read about an incredible scientific advancement being made without begging me to look at literally everything else.

      Anyway, about the story, this is something I have hoped would be possible for a very long time. I particularly feel for the Tasmanian Tiger ever since I saw the only (?) surviving video of one. It looks so scared in the tiny cage while those awful people bang on the fence. Hopefully Colossal Biosciences can pull this off, and then - as they state - apply the technique to the wooly mammoth and dodo bird. Fingers crossed!

      Also, more shame on Gizmodo for not linking to Colossal Biosciences’s website anywhere in the article. More than half the links are internal. Honestly I’m shocked that they linked to the research publication at all.

  • neuropean@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    Found the peer reviewed article, and it’s reminiscent of the Jack Sparrow meme. This has got to be the worst quality RNA-seq I’ve ever seen published (if anyone knows of any worse, feel free to link) but at least they found some mappable reads. At least globin genes had mapped reads, but I haven’t checked the thylacine genome assembly to know what degree of conservation exists between globin genes.