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More & more species are going extinct & there are seemingly
fewer & fewer interesting ones out there, if we don't do
something soon it's all going to get a bit boring, & reality TV
really isn't the answer.
What we need is a bit more uncertainty in life to spice things
up, make it interesting
again.
The boys in the lab at Skewed Ecological Solutions (TM),
entertainments division, have been
hard at work on the problem & we can now proudly unveil the
results.
A genetically modified retrovirus capable of survival in a wide
range of environments & vectors (that's species to you & me)
that
heads straight for the gonads, specifically the seminiferous
tubules of the testes.
We've managed to significantly enhance its propensity for
horizontal gene transfer in both directions.
The resulting new material passed across can be somewhat
random of course & most are impractical but occasionally we
get
some really interesting results.
Some of them have even survived a few hours after birth,
we're
expecting something viable any day now.
Unfortunately we've got as far as we can with the
limited resources available in the lab, so in the interests of
securing a broader sample base (as cheaply as possible)
we had our middle east partners 'release it into the
wild'
last Wednesday.
We had to tell them it was anthrax to encourage their
cooperation of course but rest assured it's perfectly safe, the
fever only lasts a few days & the lab boys asure me the
pustules
are nothing to worry about, & may even go down, eventually.
Retrovirus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus
WikipediA [Skewed, Oct 14 2019]
Spermatogenesis
https://en.wikipedi...iki/Spermatogenesis
WikipediA [Skewed, Oct 14 2019]
Horizontal gene transfer
https://en.wikipedi...ontal_gene_transfer
WikipediA [Skewed, Oct 14 2019]
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Annotation:
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No, wait, that wasn't the answer. |
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The proposal is to solve the problem of mass extinction by
ensuring that the next offspring of the last breeding pair of
something critically endangered is an unviable mutant. It's hard
to understand why this isn't being done already. |
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Reality TV is never the answer. |
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Beautifully put [Pert] but you missed the bit where it's
entire
genome is now scattered in untold trillions of virion seeking
the
gonads of species all over the shop.. sooner or later it's
bound to all
come together & pop up again. |
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So can anything ever really be called extinct now? |
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//proposal is to solve the problem of mass extinction// |
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Actually I just got tired of turning the leaves of my
animal
mix up flip book by hand, this way I can just sit in front of
the
window &
see what wanders by. |
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See above, it's also right there in the title, we got bored. |
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I can't bun this because it's terrible, but I can't bone this because it's terrible. |
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Success! confused ambivalence, just what I hoped for. |
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I think we could go quite a long way by artificially
hybridising things. Quite a lot of species (and I'm talking
about animals - plants even more so) will hybridise within
one genus if encouraged; there are also a few intergeneric
hybrids. But these are just the tip of a furry iceberg. |
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Most hybridisations never happen for the simple reason that
the two species never meet; or they have incompatible
mating rituals; or their genitalia just don't fit together
nicely. But with IVF, we can try a whole gamut of
interspecific (and even intergeneric) crosses. The vast
majority will still fail due to significantly different
karyotypes, but a small proportion will succeed. |
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And, once we've got a decent number of viable hybrids, we
can go further, crossing them to other hybrids or other pure
species. Llama-camel hybrids are viable; perhaps we can go
from those to a vicuna-llamel, and thence eventually to a
giraffo-vlamel. |
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We could end up with owl-pigeons, tortiose-snakes,
giraffolamas. |
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"What do we want?"
"Hippogriffs!" |
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"When do we want them?"
"As soon as the intergeneric furry iceberg of significantly different karyotype hybridisations will allow!" |
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//Hippogriffs!// Hey! That was meant to be a top secret
program! |
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An extra set of limbs is a whole other ball game. |
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And (unfortunately) one neither my retrovirus nor your hybrid
breeding plan is equipped to play. |
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Well, admittedly it's a long stretch from fruit flies to large
mammals, but enough intermediates should do the job. |
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Are the fruit fly genetic instructions for "build limb here"
sufficiently similar to tetrapods that an otherwise overtly
mammalian (or bird) genome will recognise & be able to
incorporate them in the fashion imagined here? |
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"Similar" is a strong word, [Stewed]. We all (that is, us fruit
flies and mammals) use lots of similar homeotic (body-
planning) genes, though. You can drop mouse homeotic genes
into fruit flies and they work OK. |
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I know we share vast amounts of data (what is it, 50%
cabbage?). |
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And that transposed code for proteins almost invariably
seem to work even across kingdoms. |
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But I don't think the last common ancestor of
chordata & invertebrates had limbs did it? certainly the
earliest chordate I know of didn't. |
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Which suggested to me limbs maybe
developed separately in both after the split, so no
guarantee
same (or transposable) code used if they did? |
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//You can drop mouse homeotic genes into fruit flies and they
work OK// |
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Did you get four legged wingless fruit flies then? |
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No, because the arrangement of the homeotic genes in flies is
set up for six legs; just substituting one of the genes doesn't
change that. But you can, of course, make flies with an extra
set of wings, or with legs where antennae should be. |
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Both silly & impressive :) but //the
arrangement of homeostatic genes// in tetrapods? |
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What structures around the right spot in horses could we
splice an extra set of limbs into that way? |
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And could either of
our methods (random horizontal transfer or repeat
hybridization) plausible achieve that? |
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Oh bugger! was just checking old one's, I'd forgotten this, was
someone
in Wuhan watching? |
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Given that Lombardy is not overrun with human / fruit bat
hybrids, I'm gonna say no. |
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//Given that Lombardy is not overrun with human / fruit
bat hybrids// |
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Well it won't be will it .. it's not going to show in
generation zero. |
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The first COVID case was only reported in the US in January
2020. |
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9 months for the first post infection
pregnancy to
come to term takes us to October 2020 & random is, well,
random. |
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So the odds of anything exciting showing up
yet aren't high, most won't show as
anything very dramatic, or even as anything noticeable
come to that. |
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So there won't be many yet, the first of the little darlings
are
only 4 months old & most will just look normal anyway. |
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