http://www.nature.com/nsu/020902/020902-7.html
They’ve learned that this 240 million-year-old reptile, a pre-dinosaur called an archosaur, could see at night. They learned this by recreating a protein from its eyes.
Thomas Sakmar of Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues used a computer program to extrapolate the DNA sequence of the ancient rhodopsin from known sequences in alligator, birds, frogs and fish.
Sakmar then built the extinct gene from DNA building blocks, and breathed life into it by placing it in a monkey cell. "It worked beautifully," says Sakmar.
And
Many scientists have traced back the sequence of ancestral genes - but this may be the first time that a protein from an extinct animal has been built. "It's cool," says evolutionary biologist Caro-Beth Stewart of the University of California in Berkeley at the University at Albany in New York. "There's probably nothing on the planet that has that sequence."
Not quite Jurassic Park, but almost.
Things I’d like to know: how can they be sure this really was the protein?
How far is this from reconstructing genetic material – not sampling DNA from bugs, like in Jurassic Park, but actually rebuilding it from material at hand?
I had no idea we were this close to actually making this stuff to order.
What else could we do with this technology?
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