As the holiday season approaches, we pause to give thanks to all of our friends who have engaged with Revive & Restore this past year. Our organization relies on the annual support of friends like you to continue our work from year to year; every donation will help us continue turning the tide on species extinction.
First Catalyst Fund Grant Awarded to Coral Resilience Research
Revive & Restore is pleased to announce that the first grant from our recently launched Catalyst Science Fund has been awarded to marine biologist Steve Palumbi’s laboratory at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. The $100,000 research grant will enable the Palumbi team to investigate the genomic “stress trigger” that may cause corals to bleach as a result of warming ocean conditions. This catalytic science could be an essential step forward in understanding the large-scale bleaching of coral reefs and the potential to engineer genomic resilience to climate change.
WE ARE BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY GENETIC RESCUE TOOLKIT FOR CONSERVATION
2018 Update
This year, Revive & Restore took a profound step forward, maturing from an ambitious startup to a catalytic conservation organization that is already making a difference. We launched a Catalyst Science Fund this fall to support the development of innovative genomic and biotech tools that can be applied to troubling conservation challenges like those posed by the changing climate. Importantly, the years of carefully planning, researching, fundraising, and collaborating have advanced our in-house genetic rescue projects to a point where important conservation outcomes are beginning to take shape. We would like to share with you in a little more detail the exciting advancements Revive & Restore made in 2018.
CATALYST SCIENCE FUND
We recognize that a key barrier to the adoption of genomic solutions by the conservation community is a lack of success stories. To address this issue, we are implementing select conservation projects and are excited to announce a new Catalyst Science Fund for early-stage research that will be applied towards high-impact conservation challenges.
CORAL CLIMATE CHANGE RESILIENCE
The first grant from the Catalyst Science Fund has been awarded to investigate the genomic “stress trigger” that may cause coral bleaching. This catalytic science could be an essential step forward in understanding the large-scale bleaching of coral reefs as well as the potential opportunity to engineer genomic resilience to climate chance.
OCEAN GENOMIC HORIZON SCAN
Revive & Restore is conducing a landscape assessment of the current availability of genomics and biotechnology tools for use in ocean conservation and the potential areas in ocean conservation where genetic rescue and synthetic biology could be catalytic for restoring ocean health and bio abundance.
SAVING THE HORSESHOE CRAB
The At a press event hosted by New Jersey Audubon last May, when horseshoe crabs were spawning on the beaches of Delaware Bay, Revive & Restore presented findings that will help remove a significant threat to this 450 million0year-old species and the migratory shorebirds that rely on their eggs for essential nutrition on their spring migrations.
GENETIC RESCUE FOR BLACK-FOOTED FERRET
We have received an Endangered Species Recovery Permit from U.S.F.W.S. to being the genetic rescue of North America’s most endangered mammal. This permit authorizes us to begin testing the viability of using of genomic technologies for solving the problems preventing long-term sustainability of this species: ongoing genetic diversity loss and susceptibility to sylvatic plague.
THE GREAT PASSENGER PIGEON COMEBACK
As This year, The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback made major advances in both passenger pigeon ecology and genetic engineering research. Project lead Ben Novak and his team hopes to create a model lab animal in which gene editing experiments can be performed in a single generation. This is foundational research that will help advance genetic rescue for all endangered bird species.
In the video clip below, Revive & Restore co-founder Stewart Brand reads the afterward he wrote for Ben Mezrick’s book, Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures.
