Technology used to bring back dire wolf could save other endangered species, says UNCW professor

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — For many years, the only place you could see a dire wolf was in the fantasy drama TV series, Game of Thrones.

However, relying on genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, scientists with Colossal Biosciences deciphered the dire wolf genome with technology that could also be used to save animals facing extinction.

Colossal rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf and used domestic dogs as surrogate mothers to bring 3 dire wolf pups into the world.

Brian Arbogast is a biology professor at UNCW, and he said the dire wolf is still extinct as a species.

“If you only change, you know 15 genes out of 19,000, those, what they’ve produced are basically 99.99 percent grey wolf, with 15 genes that have been altered to make them look different than the standard grey wolf,” Arbogast said.

What Colossal did with the dire wolf, Arbogast said, would be similar to changing the gene of an asian elephant to have hair and calling it a woolly mammoth, one of several other extinct species the genetics and biosciences company is also trying to bring back.

Arbogast said this same technology could, one day, be used to save species facing extinction, like the red wolf in eastern North Carolina.

“They don’t have a lot of genetic variation cause they come from just a handful of individuals so they’re all really closely related. You could use this technology to go in and you know, add variation, especially to genes like in the immune system and things like that so that they’re not all the same and so that a disease would be less likely to wipe them all out.”

Preventing these animals from being wiped out is important because the red wolf is the most endangered canidae species in the world.

Right now, there are less than 20 left in the wild and less than 300 in captivity.

During it’s work on the dire wolf, Colossal did breed 4 red wolf pups, with the company saying they plan to work on saving other endangered species with this technology.