Page 20 - Breeding Edge ebook

University of Missouri's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources in a December 2015
release. “We were able to breed a litter of pigs that do not produce this protein, and as a result, the virus
doesn’t spread. When we exposed the pigs to PRRS, they did not get sick and continued to gain weight
normally.”
Researchers working in Prather’s laboratory also created the first miniature pigs that have the alpha 1,3
galactosyltransferase gene knocked out. This groundbreaking work has the potential to prove very useful
for xenotransplantation: the transfer of pig organs into humans, Prather noted on his web site.
“We also created pigs with a mutation in the gene that is responsible for causing cystic fibrosis (CF).
Now there is a pig model that mimics the symptom of CF so that physicians have something to
invasively experiment on and develop treatments and therapies. This is especially important since the
same mutation in mice does not result in a phenotype that is similar to humans.”
More recently, scientists at the University of Missouri worked with pigs to research stem cells and made
a discovery that could significantly decrease the costs associated with in vitro fertilization in humans.
Nevertheless, gene editing will have to jump a huge policy hurdle before results of such plant and
animal breeding show up on farms, in fields and in food stores.
A number of scientists, consumer and food safety advocates, and others fear the results of editing genes
that are all naturally within a cell's nucleus the same way they do transgenic engineering, which alters
plants and animals genetically by inserting genes from unrelated organisms. They want to see the U.S.
and governments worldwide lump gene editing in with transgenic genetic alterations and regulate it as
just another type of genetically modified organism, or GMO. That would almost surely ensure years of
testing and approval for each product, as has been done for transgenic products, dramatically running up
the costs to produce gene edited products commercially.
At the California CRISPR conference, where scientists were focused on the advantages and potential of
gene editing, for example, Dana Perls, a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth, declared: “Let’s actually
call this (CRISPR) genetic engineering. Why not name it what it is?”

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