Posted for Heidi Ledford

Watch out, woolly mammoth: the Tasmanian tiger is hot on your heels. Using DNA samples culled from museum specimens, researchers have sequenced DNA from the long-extinct Tasmanian tiger. The results were published online this week by Genome Research.

The ‘tiger’ – not really a tiger but a dog-like marsupial with charming stripes – has been extinct since 1936, but it’s not the first time that researchers have decided to muck around with its DNA. Last May, scientists in the United States and Australia plucked a DNA sequence from preserved Tasmanian tiger tissue and inserted it into transgenic mice.

Now, a different team has sequenced the full mitochondrial genome using samples from two ‘tigers’. The results hint at a high degree of inbreeding in the Tasmanian tiger population, a sad but common scenario for a species heading for extinction. The work has generated lots of media coverage (eg. The Scientist; Reuters) and the usual speculation about possible resurrection of the species. (They’ll be “freak shows”, worries The Examiner.)

Pennsylvania State University researcher Stephan Schuster has worked on both the ‘tiger’ and the woolly mammoth genome projects, and has referred to his approach of sequencing from museum specimens as ‘museomics’. There was a time, years ago, when a new ‘omics’ word would often be met with rolled eyes and a groan in the lab break room. Since then, I feel like many of us have come to accept increasingly contrived ’omics as just a fact of life in an era of high-throughput biology. But Jonathan Eisen (who himself coined the term ‘phylogenomics’) is not so complacent — check out this posting on his latest award, “Worst New Omics Word Award”, and his list of new proposed ’omics.

Image: wikipedia