Imagine a place where endangered species like the Asiatic lions and Bengal tigers run freely in the wilderness. Imagine a world where wild animals are not massacred for luxury products anymore. Imagine a scenario where the spread of an invasive alien species such as the lantana is no longer a threat to the native biodiversity.
Earth’s biodiversity is declining rapidly. While nature conservationists are trying hard to conserve the remaining species, the ecological interactions are way past disrupted. However, the newly emerging field of Synthetic biology can provide a helping hand in nature conservation by using some of the greatest gene-editing tools available such as CRISPR-Cas 9, to perform tweaky lil’ manipulations in the genetic material of organisms.
Synthetic biology can act as a tremendous tool to prevent biodiversity loss, restore biological interactions and conserve natural ecosystems. Research into how synthetic biology can help restore the natural interactions could help us clean polluted waters, control invasive species, reduce pressures from wildlife trade, improve disease resistance, and even bring a species back from the brink of extinction.
Invasive Species
One of the major threats to biodiversity is the spread of invasive species that disrupt natural habitats and push native species to extinction.
What if we genetically tweak these invasive species to stop them from spreading?
For instance, on the Hawaiian Islands, mosquitos transmitting avian malaria has lead to a rapid decline in the native bird species and disrupted the island ecosystem.
What if we could wipe out avian malaria without spraying any toxic pesticides by releasing male mosquitoes that have been engineered to be reproductively sterile?
Such genetic manipulations can be made to spread across the population by a method known as ‘gene drive’ to reduce the invasive species and protect the native biodiversity. Eradicating such invasive species could restore ecosystems and let the evolutionary processes resume unfettered.
Bringing Species From The Brink Of Extinction
While seeing dodos and woolly mammoths running in the wild might be fascinating, it is more important to focus on preserving the existing species by applying synbio techniques. Assisted reproductive techniques such as gamete cryopreservation, artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and in vitro fertilization could allow the propagation of wild endangered species and give a push to the critical species that are long gone from the wild.
For instance, the Northern white rhinos of Africa have been in decline for decades. By 2018, the population had dwindled to two remaining females, who are the last of their kind in the world. In a desperate attempt to conserve this critically endangered species, scientists are now using IVF procedures and genetic methods to create embryos from fresh eggs of the two remaining female rhinos and frozen sperm from dead males. Even though they have been successful in doing so, it would probably take a long time to see these rhinos being functional on the wild grasslands of Africa.
No More Wild Products
Biosynthesis isn’t something new to us, one of the classic examples being insulin production by engineered bacteria. The synthetic production of human insulin revolutionized the field of synthetic biology. We are now able to produce abundant amounts of insulin without worrying about domesticating animals for it. This same process can reduce the commercial need to extract biological products from wild species.
For instance, Horseshoe crabs, aka. the living fossils have been exploited for their blood by pharmaceutical companies for decades. The horseshoe crabs are highly sensitive to bacterial toxins, so drug companies extensively use them to test for any possible product injected into the human body, causing a dangerous decline in their population.
However, the pharmaceutical companies have finally started committing to an alternative that doesn’t harm animals. Scientists have engineered a synthetic replacement for horseshoe crab blood cells that have been commercially available for more than 15 years; it has yet to be broadly adopted.
Should SynBio Interfere?
With benefits comes the cost. While synbio can potentially impact the field of nature conservation, some might argue that playing with nature’s DNA could be an ethically false way to save the natural world, and that too with unforeseen consequences.
However, targeted manipulation of certain species might be one of our last hopes to help conserve biodiversity and save the declining species. Careful use of synthetic biology techniques in nature conservation might allow us to witness critical animals from just being a few cells in a test tube to be running freely in the wild.
References:
29 Apr 2020: Buchman A, Gamez S, Li M, Antoshechkin I, Li HH, et al. (2020) Correction: Broad dengue neutralization in mosquitoes expressing an engineered antibody. PLOS Pathogens 16(4): e1008545. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1008545
