Van Eenennaam details global research in livestock gene editing, expensive process to FDA approval.
CRISPR is king. That’s what Cooperative Extension Professor in Animal Genomics and Biotechnology at UC Davis, Alison Van Eenennaam, and her post-doc, Alba Ledesma, found out when the European Food Safety Authority asked them to do a review of the global research in genome editing of livestock for food and agricultural production.
"About 80% of all of the edits detailed in peer-reviewed research publications were being done using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. Other editing technologies such as zinc-finger nucleases and TALENs, predated CRISPR/Cas9, and comparatively they’re more complicated and expensive to use. They do the same thing, make a double-stranded break in the DNA at a targeted location in the genome, but they’re more expensive and complicated to use," Van Eenennaam says. "That’s part of the attractiveness and the democratization of genome editing is that with CRISR/Cas9, you just need to order a different CRISPR guide and you can target the Cas9 to cut at a different region in the genome."
Last week during the 100th Annual USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum, Van Eenennaam shared the data compiled from the 195 peer-reviewed publications, as well as an update on the work Genus plc has done to develop a new generation of CRISPR-edited pigs that are resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory virus syndrome.
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