The Plan To Collect and Save the DNA of Everything on the Endangered Species List
· Time
Not a lot of plants and animals make it off the Endangered Species List alive. Established Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the list now comprises more than 2,100 struggling species. In the past half century, only 54 species have recovered sufficiently to be delisted (like the bald eagle and the giant panda). Along with the ones that have managed to fly off the list, 67 others died off it—such as the Bachman’s warbler and the Little Marianas fruit bat—going extinct despite government protection. In 2023 alone, 21 species met this end. The thousands of others on the list continue to survive—but on the extinction knife edge.
Now there is a plan to save them—or at least their genetic material. On June 25, Colossal Biosciences—the Dallas-based company that last year de-extincted the dire wolf and aims to bring back more lost beasts including the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, and the woolly mammoth—announced that it is partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to collect and freeze cell and tissue samples of every species on the list. The goal is to establish something of a library of the species’ genomes in case they ever have to be de-extincted or, in the alternative, if their populations dwindle so far that more heartiness or genetic variability needs to be gene-edited into the survivors.
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“We want a digital twin of nature,” says Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, “something like the old school library card catalog for life.”
“This collaboration will help advance our understanding of how biobanking and genomics can help complement existing conservation tools and contribute to the recovery and long-term resilience of imperiled species,” said Fish and Wildlife’s Director Brian Nesvik in a statement.
The need is pressing. The 2,100 species on the U.S. list are a lot, but they’re just a fraction of a whopping 48,600 species identified as either threatened or endangered on the so-called red list of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). All of those could be lost in less than a human lifetime. According to the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, up to 30% of the planet’s existing genetic diversity will vanish by as early as 2050 due to factors including climate change, habitat loss, and environmental pollutants.
Against this onrushing die-off, Colossal and Fish and Wildlife are hoping to hold the line at least a little bit. The two began having discussions about an effort of this kind five years ago. The government agency was aware of a frozen biobank Colossal was already establishing in its Dallas headquarters—where tissue and cell lines of some 200 species so far are kept preserved in a liquid nitrogen bath at -274°F. That collection, however, was not specific to the species on the official endangered list and Fish and Wildlife was interested in seeing such an inventory take shape.
“We were talking with Director Nesvik,” says Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal officer, “and initially, in a very government way, they said, ‘What if we did 100 species?’ In our Colossal minds we said, ‘We need to think bigger. Let’s just say, aspirationally, we’re going to go for every species on the list.’”
That’s not easy. For one thing, there’s the matter of collecting samples—no small thing when species are endangered in the first place and must be handled in as noninvasive a way as possible. Blood draws and skin biopsies are pretty much the limit of what Colossal scientists can do in the field. That’s fine, but it constrains the kinds of cells available for collection. Ideally, organ cells and gametes—egg and sperm—would be gathered too. Colossal thus stays alert for the remains of endangered species found in the wild and deaths in zoos willing to work with the company.
“Say we find a carcass or a zoo is euthanizing an animal,” says James. “Then we can do a necropsy and get a variety of tissues.”
Before putting these samples on ice, Colossal and Fish and Wildlife will also be fully sequencing the cells to create a complete digital record of the animals’ genomes. They also hope to engineer some of the cells so that they revert to an embryonic stage of development known as induced pluripotent stem cells, blank biological slates that can be engineered again to become any type of cell in the body—bone, muscle, heart, digestive, eye, egg, ovum, and more.
“We’ve derived pluripotent stem cells from elephants for the first time,” says James. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on and as we have these breakthroughs I imagine the floodgates will really open on that type of work.”
The new collaboration will not keep its samples and its sequences to itself. The biobank will be open-sourced to labs and universities around the world that may be doing similar conservation and de-extinction work of their own. “Everyone should share in what we have,” says Lamm.
Significant as the new partnership could be for America’s endangered species, it is part of a larger ecosystem of frozen biobanks in development or already in operation around the world. In February, Colossal announced another partnership, this one with the Museum of the Future in Dubai, where scientists are looking to cryopreserve cell and tissue samples from more than 10,000 species. The facility, which is expected to open in October, will feature interactive displays and glass partitions that will allow museum visitors to watch real scientists doing real work in a real lab. Colossal and Dubai envision the biobank serving as the center of a hub and spoke arrangement of labs around the region where tissues of indigenous animals are stored and shared. It’s the museum element of the Dubai facility that is its distinguishing feature, not only enabling solid scientific work to be done but educating and engaging the public about its potential.
“I don't know if a family that goes in and sees a bio vault that is a bunch of white freezers is going to get excited,” says Lamm. “But you can take some of our reports and put those on cool automated screens, and [visitors] can use robots to pull vials out and see them. I think that that goes a lot further.”
Though Colossal has made its public name with its de-extinction efforts, the company and Fish and Wildlife see particular potential not in efforts to bring animals back from the dead but in keeping them alive before they are lost in the first place. That’s where the whole-genome sequencing they will do before the samples are frozen could be of real benefit. In a steadily warming world, endangered animals have to deal with climatic extremes and new pathogens that they might not have been exposed to before but that thrive in hotter climates.
“We can start to figure out what are the genes associated with things like disease mitigation or drought tolerance,” says James. “There are many different ways we can try to engineer nature to be more resilient in the future.”
Whether merely enhanced or fully de-extincted, the listed animals fighting for their lives can be real-world beneficiaries of the public-private deal struck this week. “This is a service to America,” says Lamm. “It’s a global biological vision, [helping animals go] from freezer to free.”