On May 19, Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, which last year made headlines when it effectively de-extincted the dire wolf, announced that it had hatched a flock of 26 live chicks from fully artificial eggs. The technology behind the breakthrough can be later applied to bring back the dodo and New Zealand’s giant, flightless moa—both on Colossal’s de-extinction “to do” list.
Designing an artificial shell is not easy because a natural shell is deceptively complex. Made principally of calcium carbonate arranged in a crystalline structure, a typical egg shell is no more than 0.4 mm thick, and covered with up to 17,000 tiny pores to allow for gas exchange with the ambient atmosphere—carbon dioxide out, and oxygen in. There are, too, a pair of slick inner membranes in the egg that perform another critical function, protecting the growing chick from invading bacteria. But those membranes have to be exceedingly thin.
The egg Colossal invented was very different. The inner membranes were made of vanishingly thin silicon using a proprietary technology that Colossal is planning to patent. The shell itself was only about two-thirds of a shell—a titanium structure that resembles nothing so much as a soft-boiled-egg cup with its top missing, albeit with hundreds of hexagonal pores to allow for gas exchange. Once a few dozen of the titanium eggs were manufactured, Colossal gathered fertilized chicken eggs from an avian farm the company owns and operates and transported them to the lab. There, the scientists gently opened the top of the egg and transferred the yolk and the white and the tiny embryo onto the titanium egg cup and covered the cup with a transparent lid. The embryos were about three days past fertilization when they were transferred, meaning that they had 18 days remaining in their three-week incubation cycle.
There is, of course, no need fior a new technology to create chickens, as the egg does a perfectly adequate job of producing the 27.6 billion of them that are alive around the world on farms and in hatcheries at any one time. But Colossal has its eye on another animal entirely. In July, the company announced that it intended to de-extinct the 12-ft.-tall, 500-lb. flightless bird known as the Moa. The species once thrived across New Zealand until human beings hunted it to extinction some 600 years ago. The disappearance of the moa also resulted in the disappearance of the Haast’s eagle, which relied on the moa as its sole prey.
But there’s a problem with this plan. A fully developed moa egg is 80 times the size of a chicken egg and eight times that of an emu egg. A surrogate emu could lay an egg that, for a time, would be big enough to accommodate a tiny moa embryo, but as the chick-to-be continued to grow, it would be far too large for the shell that encased it. The strategy then would be to carefully crack open the shell and transfer the contents to an artificial egg like the ones that produced the chickens, but 80 times larger.
Before that, Colossal must practice with other species of small birds, then scale up to a large emu, and finally to the brobdingnagian moa. Nature created the perfect little reproductive package when it invented the egg. Science, slowly, is learning to match it.
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