This is a holding place, stockpiling the cells of Australia’s most threatened species for resurrection in a potentially desolate future – a frozen archive held in suspended animation as an insurance policy against biodiversity loss. Welcome to the Ian Potter Australian Wildlife Biobank – a final stronghold against Australia’s extinction crisis.
The biobank is like a “frozen zoo” within the Melbourne Museum that is cryogenically freezing live animal cells in a bid to preserve the genetic diversity of Australia’s unique wildlife. Scientists hope to one day reintroduce this genetic material back into wild populations through cloned lab-grown cells, to help boost a population’s genetic diversity – or even bring a species back from extinction.
“The idea behind this [the biobank] is being able to preserve cells from all of our endangered species in a living format,” says project lead Professor Andrew Pask, an epigeneticist from The University of Melbourne. “Far down the track…if we have a horrendous bushfire that wipes out a particular species, or so many animals from that population that they’re unhealthy, you could use these cells to bring back the [genetic] variation that occurred in that particular region and rewild those animals once the bush is regenerated.”
The biobank began collecting genetic material in January 2024, following a $500,000 grant from the Australian Research Council Linkage in 2023. At the time of going to press, they had gathered DNA from upwards of 20 species, including the fat-tailed dunnart, brolga, smoky mouse, malleefowl and dusky antechinus. “We’re kind of opportunistically collecting everything we can,” Andrew says. The biobank aims to cryopreserve the genetic material of more than 100 species over the next three years.
Most of the cells collected are skin cells, which were scraped from an animal’s ear or foot during population surveys or donated from zoos and breeding programs. “At the moment we are doing things with people already out monitoring and catching animals,” Andrew says. “We supply them with tubes, so that when they’ve got the animal, they just do these little skin scrapings or clippings and then drop them into the vial that comes back to the museum.”
Remarkably, the scientists at the living biobank can culture cells from animals up to a week after an animal has died. Cells extracted from a loggerhead turtle and common dolphin made their way into the collection after washing up dead on a beach, while other cells were sourced from roadkill.
At the lab, geneticists establish cell lines – a population of cloned cells – from these skin scrapings. Andrew says skin cells are ideal for cloning because of its high cellular turnover. “Because our skin is constantly replacing itself, it grows really fast so it’s a really good way to get…millions of cells that we can then freeze to make sure we never lose that DNA, that uniqueness, from that population again,” he says. The cells are frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at –196°C. This sub-zero temperature puts the cells’ biological processes “on pause” and allows the genetic material to be preserved indefinitely.
Andrew is also the head of the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Laboratory (TIGRR Lab) at The University of Melbourne and is arguably best known for his work on the “de-extinction” of the thylacine. Without access to any living genetic material from a thylacine, Andrew says the bulk of his work at the TIGRR Lab involves engineering cells back into existence. “For the thylacine we never had this foresight – or the technology – to save cells down,” he says. “It’s a very long, slow process [that’s] going to take us years and years and years.” But the frozen biobank means that, should a species become extinct, scientists will have access to a frozen repository of cell lines. “You already have that living cell, you’ve got that intact nucleus, and so it’s just a matter of turning those cells back into an animal,” Andrew says.
Some skin cells are reprogrammed into stem cells that, in turn, can be differentiated into gametes – sperm and egg cells – and used to create a living animal. But animals can be cloned without this stem cell technology. “You can take just the nucleus from that cell line – so these are just skin cells – and put it into an embryo that you’ve taken the DNA out of, and then you can create a whole other animal from that,” Andrew says, explaining that this was the method used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1997.
The genetic material preserved in the biobank is an insurance policy against diversity loss at a time when an entire species might be wiped out in an extreme weather event. A single flood or bushfire could render an entire species locally extinct – or shrink a population to such a degree that they’re put on the fast-track to extinction.
The smoky mouse is one such species. This critically endangered rodent is scattered across south-eastern Australia but is mostly concentrated around the Victoria–New South Wales border. Urbanisation and bushfires have fragmented populations and prompted a major collapse of genetic diversity within the species. “[Smoky mouse populations] were heavily impacted by the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires in NSW, and the smoke may have been the cause of deaths in the captive breeding program in Canberra,” says Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals at Museums Victoria. “In Victoria the populations were mostly spared. There’s a major smoky mouse population in Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park in western Victoria that didn’t suffer from the fire, but they suffered from the fire [in February 2024].” Faced with an uncertain future, the biobank has cryopreserved DNA donated by the University of Canberra’s smoky mouse captive breeding program.
The biobank also holds genetic material extracted from two broad-toothed rats, which were trapped and released back into the wild after an ear biopsy. These endangered rodents dwell in Australia’s alpine and subalpine regions – and this was the first species to have its cells cryopreserved in Museums Victoria’s collection. “Broad-toothed rats were heavily impacted by the [Black Summer] bushfires, particularly in their northern habitat in the alpine regions,” Kevin says. “In the eastern alpine region we had quite a few sites that were completely scorched earth where they were present.”
As well as preserving the genetic material of animals teetering on extinction, the biobank holds material from animals seemingly back from the dead. The grassland earless dragon was believed extinct from the 1960s until a small population was discovered during a building survey last winter. Melbourne Zoo has now established a captive breeding program to ensure the future of this species, and has donated cells to the biobank.
At the time of going to press, 18 of the species preserved in the biobank are native to Australia. Two are non-native but endangered – the Asian elephant and Bornean orangutan – and there’s even one invasive species, the black rat.
“One of the interesting things about cells is we can use them to preserve genetic diversity in a living form in species, but we can also use it as a tool to potentially control invasive species,” Kevin says. “Our colleagues in the TIGRR Lab are working on growing those cells and making stem cells from them, ultimately to come up with methods for controlling their populations in the wild.”
