Betül Kaçar

So we inserted roughly a 700 million year old elongation factor protein

after removing the modern gene.

So we made this ancient modern hybrid organism.

I wouldn't say so.

It's a hybrid organism.

Because the rest of the genome is still modern.

And that goes back to the difference between Jurassic Park.

There are many differences, obviously, given that this is not fiction, we're doing it.

But also, we are not necessarily... I think in Jurassic Park, they are taking...

They find an ancient organism and then put a modern gene inside the ancient organism.

In our case, we are still working with what we got, but putting an ancestral DNA inside the modern organism.

In a way, yeah.

Yes.

Yes, but in our case, it's more like a transformer than just a regular car.

It is doing things.

We wanted to understand multiple things.

One is how does the cell respond to perturbation?

And we didn't just put the ancient DNA.

We sampled DNA from currently existing organisms, so the cousins of this microbe.

and collected DNA sequences from the cousins as well.