Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?

In addition to placing dire wolves more firmly in the Canidae family tree (they’re slightly closer to jackals than to gray wolves, but more than 99.9% identical to both at a genetic level) and determining when dire wolves split from the pack (about 4 million years ago), the team also located around 80 genes where dire wolves seemed to be most different. If you wanted to turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf, this would be the obvious list to start from. Crying wolf Colossal then began the process of using base editing, an updated form of the CRISPR gene-modification technique, to introduce some of those exact DNA variations into blood cells of a gray wolf kept in its labs. Each additional edit, the company hoped, would make the eventual animal a little more dire-wolf-like, even it involved changing just a single letter of a gene. Shapiro says all the edits involve “genetic enhancers,” bits of DNA that help control how strongly certain genes are expressed. These can influence how big ani ... Read full article.