De-extinction firm Colossal Biosciences’ recently developed AI tool is paving a quicker pathway to the dodo’s return, the company announced Wednesday.
The platform, GenoMorph, pinpoints the genetic code that gives the bird its unique appearance and has already identified 2,300 DNA targets that shape the bird’s beak and facial structure, according to the press release.
“It takes the very large data set that we have and then compiles it much shorter so that we have a high degree of confidence in our editing targets,” explains Ben Lamm, Colossal’s CEO. “Then we can say, these are the first 50 edits we can make that we believe will have the biggest impact on true dodo traits, that iconic skull.”
Working with ancient DNA poses a few major problems, Lamm says: there’s a limited quantity, it’s highly fragmented and it degrades quickly—particularly rapidly in the dodo’s case, since its native Mauritius is hot and wet. The Colossal team, led by Chief Science Officer Beth Shapiro, was able to assemble one high quality genome. (By contrast, for the woolly mammoth, native to the cold, dry tundra, they have 104 genomes.)
And since genetic diversity and anomalies cause DNA variance among members of the same species, it can be difficult to point to which parts of the genetic code define an animal.
“You have all these things that disguise themselves as uniqueness in the genome, when it’s really something that isn’t core to the morphology and the ecological function of that animal,” Lamm says.
GenoMorph provides a funnel to identify the genetic code that is crucial to dodo’s distinctive features. The model, trained on developmental data from quails, ducks, chickens and pigeons, explains Anna Keyte, who specializes in avian genome engineering at Colossal, and the model learned what DNA looks like when creating specific structures to fill in the gaps in species for whom that data is missing.