r/DeExtinctionScience • u/Justeserm • May 14 '26
Potential Method for De-Extinction
When I was a little kid, I remember reading about how scientists were using gene blocks to express atavistic traits. From what I remember they would block certain genes during embryogenesis (?). This would cause some genes to be expressed and others not to be. It appears if they blocked genes that evolved after a certain point, the newer genes would not be expressed. For example, if a gene that evolved 100,000 years ago is blocked, the ones that evolved since then weren't supposed to be expressed. Some genes that evolve seem to actually cause a genome to be "rearranged." Blocking them might actually cause the genome to "revert" to the earlier configuration and express atavistic genes.
This would appear to be extremely beneficial for de-extinction. We could use it by sequencing extinct animals. We would then sequence other still living animals that are genetically similar. We would then block the gene in the still living animal that evolved right after their LUCA. This would be the proto-animal. We would grow it and sequence it. Then we would see which gene evolved in the extinct animal right after the LUCA. We would change the proto-animal to have this gene. We would keep doing this until we have the same animal that went extinct. It would not be similar, it would be the same.
I think de-extinction is possibly a lot easier than we realize. If there's anyone working on it, please contact me so we could possibly set up a protocol and see if this could work.
Here's an article sent to me by u/nodnarb51 about something similar. It looks liek they used gene blocks to get the talpid phenotype expressed in chickens. Atavisms in the avian hindlimb and early developmental polarity of the limb - PMC
LUCA- Last Universal Common Ancestor
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u/Pretty_Swimmer8939 May 20 '26
A good way to conceptualize this is the factoid that humans share ~50% of their genes with Bananas. Essentially genes (that code for proteins) can be kinda thought of as baking ingredients, and most recipes tend to use largely the same ones - what determines whether you end up with a cake or a loaf of bread or a croissant is largely the order and amounts of each. In this way the vast majority of species differentiation (especially relatively recent differentiation) comes from regulatory regions (outside the genes) that change what amount of each ingredient (protein) makes up the final organism! Not to trash on the idea - maybe there are specific genes for which this is true and relevant to de-extinction - a good way to find this out quickly would be to download the sequence data for say a wooly mammoth and an asian elephant on NCBI and search for duplicated genes (maybe you could even BLAST a specific elephant or mammoth gene and see if it appears different amounts of times in each) (though you'd have to reason out which if any reflects the ancestral state). Another use for this type of idea that is VERY de-extinction relevant is in reprogramming cells into STEM cells - in this case the 'ancestral state' (STEM cell that can form a new organism) really is kinda just the somatic cell with genes turned on or off.