Passenger pigeon
Night of the Living Dead Pigeon
15/03/13 16:18 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Ben Novak, is a 26-year-old genetics student who has put his graduate studies on hold to help bring the extinct passenger pigeon back from the dead by sequencing available fragments of the genome of the passenger pigeon from the slime left in museum specimens and comparing them to the genome of its cousin, the band-tailed pigeon. Working with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Novak hopes to complete full sequences of the passenger and band-tailed pigeon genomes within a year. S. Pelech comments that even with the successful sequencing of the complete genome of the passenger pigeon, the site-directed mutagenesis of the genome of a living pigeon relative to convert it into a passenger pigeon is just too expensive and time-consuming to be worthwhile. Read More...