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Conservationists in the US are turning to cloning and gene editing to help threatened species such as the black-footed ferret Ben Novak with a clone of ‘Willa’, a wild-caught black-footed ferret whose cell line was cryopreserved in 1988 INTERVIEW u Revive & Restore is a not-for-profit organisation promoting the development and adoption of biotechnologies in conservation. Founded by the American biomedical entrepreneur Ryan Phelan and her futurist husband, Stewart Brand, its work aims to protect and enhance biodiversity through the ‘genetic rescue’ of threatened, endangered and even extinct species. Best known for controversial ‘de-extinction’ projects, Revive & Restore’s work has expanded to the development of We cloned a black-footed ferret in 2020 … That single individual has more unique alleles than virtually the entire surviving population a suite of technologies that could aid conservationists in their work, from genomics to gene editing to cloning. More recently it has moved into funding projects with similar aims. Hi Ben. Can you give us an example of what your approach can achieve that ‘traditional’ conservation can’t? The black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) is probably the first species in which we will be deploying the entire range of the toolkit we have been developing. When we were approached by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, it was clear there were two distinct threats facing this species that were compromising its long-term recovery. The first is that the ferrets have become so rare that they have lost huge amounts of their original genetic diversity. The blackfooted ferret was once found from southern Canada through central US to northern Mexico, but went down to a single surviving population of around 100 individuals. Despite the best efforts of captive breeding programmes, all the black-footed ferrets alive today are descended from just seven animals. They are all slightly more related to each other than first cousins, and their reproductive success has been declining as a result. The big news is that we cloned a black-footed ferret in 2020, with our partners Biogen, San Diego Zoo and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It was cloned from cells in San Diego’s Frozen Zoo biobank from an animal that was unrelated to those original seven founders. That single individual has more unique alleles than virtually the entire surviving population. There’s also an introduced disease, canine distemper, on the landscape, meaning no matter how successfully we Re store & ive ; Rev lamy A Vol 71 No 2 / THE BIOLOGIST / 13

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