July 18, 2025

Genome engineering for species conservation

Much has been made of the potential of genome engineering to bring back extinct species.  But what about its potential for biodiversity and conservation of existing threatened species?

Traditional conservation techniques such as captive breeding and habitat protection can be successful in boosting population numbers but this can leave species populations with low genetic diversity, leaving them more vulnerable to future threats like new diseases or climate change.

In a new Perspectives article in Nature Reviews Biodiversity, a team of scientists examines the potential for CRISPR-based editing to complement existing conservation in the following ways:

1. Restoring lost variation – bringing back genetic diversity that has been lost from the gene pool of the modern populations of threatened species, using DNA from samples of the species collected decades or even centuries ago, which are stored in natural history museums all over the world
2. Facilitated adaptation – introducing genes from related, better-adapted species to confer traits like heat tolerance or pathogen resistance, equipping threatened species to adapt to rapid environmental change
3. Reducing genetic load – populations that have previously crashed in numbers often carry harmful mutations that have become fixed by chance, so targeted gene edits could replace these mutations with the healthy variant from before the population crash – with the potential to improve fertility, survival rates, and overall health.

Is this what the future of conservation looks like?  What potential does it have and what are the risks scientists need to avoid?

Journalists came to this briefing to hear from three of the authors and put their questions to them.

Speakers included:

Prof Cock van Oosterhout, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the University of East Anglia 

Dr Anna Keyte, Species Director at Colossal Biosciences

Prof Jim Groombridge, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent

This Briefing was accompanied by an SMC Roundup of comments.