The US government and biotech company Colossal Biosciences are teaming up to sequence the genomes and preserve tissue samples for every species on the Endangered Species Act list.
The announcement covers over 2,300 plant and animal populations still on the list. The partnership will populate Colossal’s planned “BioVault,” a facility for preserving tissues and reproductive cells from at-risk species, and use those samples to create whole genome sequences for each one.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service will handle field collection and sampling. All genomic data will be deposited into open-access repositories at no cost to the global scientific community, though some limits may apply for samples from lands under tribal authority or populations at risk of poaching.
The pairing is unusual. The US government has generally tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act as part of its anti-regulatory push. Colossal, meanwhile, is best known for its headline-grabbing de-extinction efforts, including the controversial “dire wolf” project that involved editing just a handful of genetic changes into grey wolves.
Colossal frames the initiative as conservation-focused, but its business model relies on gene editing and reproductive technologies it expects to profitably license. Whether this partnership represents a genuine pivot toward conservation or a pivot toward legitimacy remains an open question.
