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The renowned company continues to shape the future of bioengineering, and with its latest success, pushes the boundaries of avian biology.
Let’s be honest. Regardless of where you stand in its ethical debate, almost every headline surrounding Colossal Biosciences and its endeavours never fail to leave us intrigued.
With that said, the company is currently basking in its recent success, where they hatched chickens from artificial eggs. Not so bombastic of an achievement is it at first glance? Compared to reviving the Dire Wolf or mapping the genes of mammoths onto a lab mouse, its recent achievement may seem insignificant, but in truth carries immense weight.
The 26 healthy chickens
A few days back, Colossal announced that they managed to hatch 26 healthy chickens inside entirely artificial, 3D-printed eggshell systems. This breakthrough marks the first time multiple birds have been successfully grown and hatched completely outside of a natural eggshell.
To pull off such a fragile miracle of life, the company’s experts harvested fertilised chicken eggs and cracked them open within 24 to 48 hours of laying. Then, they carefully transferred the early-stage embryos and yolks into custom 3D printed plastic cups shaped like natural egg bottoms.
These cups were lined with an ultra-thin silicone membrane that mimicked a real shell where it allowed gas exchange, locked-in essential moisture, and blocked external bacteria.
In their natural development, growing embryos absorb calcium from the eggshell to build the skeletons of the chicks. So, the researchers supplemented the artificial eggs with ground up calcium to ensure proper bone development of the chickens.
The synthetic setup also featured a completely transparent viewing window which allowed the scientists to monitor the embryos in real time.
The issue with avian reproduction
When scientists want to de-extinct mammals, they can simply edit a cell, create an embryo, and implant into a living surrogate mother. However, with birds, it just simply does not work this way. An avian embryo must develop inside a rigid, highly specialised external eggshell. Hence, it’s a no brainer as to why Colossal Biosciences has been keen on solving such a bottleneck issue, especially when their ultimate goals lie far beyond mere chickens.
In trying to bring back long-lost avian species, experts ran into two major problems. For starters, to bring back certain prehistoric birds, you would need an egg that could grow up to massive sizes. Unfortunately, there is no living bird on Earth capable of laying or incubating an egg of that scale
Additionally, for decades, scientists have tried to hatch chicks outside of natural shells using plastic wrap or basic films. Sadly, these embryos almost always died because they lacked oxygen. While certain lab setups attempted to pump in massive amounts of concentrated supplemental oxygen, it inadvertently caused severe DNA damage and fatal toxic stress to the fragile embryos.
Hence, Colossal just proved that we can now scale the physical size of an egg while ensuring the synthetic shell perfectly aids embryonic development. By finally shattering these barriers, the company has cleared the path to resurrecting two of history’s most iconic birds: the Dodo and the Giant Moa.
For the Dodo, this means real-time tracking of modified traits, while for the Giant Moa, it would mean synthetic eggs the size of a football. In doing so, the overall process removes the need for a biological mother from the reproductive equation. As such, avian de-extinction has moved from being ecologically unpredictable to a tech driven lab process.
