Jurassic World Moves Closer to Reality with Birth of the Woolly Mouse

We all watch movies like Jurassic Park and Jurassic World and marvel at the possibilities of bringing back animals and creators from the history books into the present day, and now Colossal Biosciences has made a massive step towards doing just that. Colossal Biosciences has achieved a huge milestone in advanced multiplexed genome engineering with the birth of the Colossal Woolly Mouse, who have been engineered to express multiple key mammoth-like traits that allow it to adapt to life in cold climates. You can get an up-close look at the Woolly Mice below.

These mice have been created with altered coat color, texture, and thickness, which are all reminiscent the woolly mammoth’s core phenotypes. This is a huge step in showing the feasibility of expressing traits using all of the information learned from computational analysis of 59 wooly, Columbian, and steppe mammoth genomes, which range from 3,500 to over 1,200,000 years old. These are all crucial targets for mammoth de-extinction.

Colossal’s mammoth team explored a data set of 121 mammoth and elephant genomes, identifying significant genes that impact hair and other cold-adaptation traits. The official release states that the team focused on a suite of genes in which mammoths had evolved fixed differences compared to their closely related Asian elephant cousins, and then refined the list to include ten genes related to hair length, thickness, texture, and color as well as lipid metabolism that were compatible with expressions in a mouse.

The team then edited the mouse genome using a combination of three editing technologies, including RNP-mediated knockout, multiplex precious genome editing, and precision homology-directed repair (HDR). Those edits were made simultaneously, and some of the editing efficiencies were as high as 100% to modify seven genes.

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“The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Co-Founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. “By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we’ve proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create. This success brings us a step closer to our goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth.”

“The Colossal Woolly Mouse showcases our ability to use the latest genome editing tools and approaches to drive predictable phenotypes,” said Dr. Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal. “It is an important step toward validating our approach to resurrecting traits that have been lost to extinction and that our goal is to restore.”

“I’m incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished here in the lab in such a short period of time,” said Dr. Michael Abrams, who co-leads Colossal’s Mammoth Team. “We’ve pushed the boundaries of genetic engineering by coordinating multiple complex trait modifications in living animals with exceptionally high efficiency. This achievement showcases both the technical expertise of our scientists and the power of our genetic engineering platform to deliver predictable phenotypes.”

“The Colossal Woolly Mouse demonstrates remarkable progress we’ve made in precise genome engineering, including optimized delivery methods, innovative multiplexing and combinations of gene targeting strategies,” said George Church, Professor of Genetics at the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School and Co-founder of Colossal. “We are showing that we can now rationally design and construct complex genetic adaptations, with profound implications for the future of multi-gene de-extinction and engineering.”

Fans will have a chance to hear from Lamm and actor and producer Joe Manganiello in a special keynote at SXSW today at 2 pm CT to talk about the implications of the Woolly Mouse and it’s impact on Colossal’s de-extinction efforts.

What do you think of the Woolly Mouse, and are we one major step closer to actually making Jurassic Park a reality? Let us know in the comments or on Bluesky @knightofoa!