Scientists a step closer to resurrecting extinct Tasmanian tiger

Scientists have taken another step towards the resurrection of the Tasmanian tiger with the first successful recovery of RNA from an extinct species. 

RNA is the genetic material present in all living cells and has structural similarities to DNA. The discovery, published in the scientific journal Genome Research, offers "hope that RNA locked up in the world's museum collections could provide new insights into long-dead species", said Nature.

The Tasmanian tiger – also known as the thylacine – was, despite the name, a carnivorous marsupial that lived on the island of Tasmania, Australia. The last known Tasmanian tiger died in captivity in 1936 and the animal was classified as officially extinct in 1982. The material in the new study was extracted from the desiccated skin and muscle of a Tasmanian tiger, stored since 1891 at a museum in Stockholm.

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"RNA gives you the chance to go through the cell, the tissues and find the real biology that has been preserved in time for that animal, the thylacine species, right before they died," said lead study author Emilio Mármol Sánchez, a computational biologist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics and SciLifeLab in Stockholm. 

It is the first time RNA has been recovered from an extinct species and the technique "may help our understanding of virus evolution and further controversial de-extinction efforts", said New Scientist. De-extinction is the process of recreating versions of extinct species using gene-editing tools and existing organisms as hosts.

While de-extinction wasn't the goal of Sánchez's team's research, "a better understanding of the Tasmanian tiger's genetic makeup could help recently launched efforts to bring back the animal in some form", said CNN.

"We had previously thought only DNA remained in old museum and ancient samples," said Andrew Pask, from the University of Melbourne, who is part of a team looking at de-extinction of the species. "This can tell us about the function of genes in an extinct animal."