Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
Volume 223, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jeb.207159
Keywords
Genetic improvement; Genome editing; Livestock; Food animal; Animal breeding
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- Biotechnology Risk Assessment Grant (BRAG) program, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) [2015-67015-23316, 2015-33522-24106, 2017-33522-27097]
- USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) [2018-67030-28360]
- NIFA [810183, 2015-33522-24106] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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The prospect of genome editing offers a number of promising opportunities for livestock breeders. Firstly, these tools can be used in functional genomics to elucidate gene function, and identify causal variants underlying monogenic traits. Secondly, they can be used to precisely introduce useful genetic variation into structured livestock breeding programs. Such variation may include repair of genetic defects, the inactivation of undesired genes, and the moving of useful alleles and haplotypes between breeds in the absence of linkage drag. Editing could also be used to accelerate the rate of genetic progress by enabling the replacement of the germ cell lineage of commercial breeding animals with cells derived from genetically elite lines. In the future, editing may also provide a useful complement to evolving approaches to decrease the length of the generation interval through in vitro generation of gametes. For editing to be adopted, it will need to seamlessly integrate with livestock breeding schemes. This will likely involve introducing edits into multiple elite animals to avoid genetic bottlenecks. It will also require editing of different breeds and lines to maintain genetic diversity, and enable structured crossbreeding. This requirement is at odds with the process-based trigger and event-based regulatory approach that has been proposed for the products of genome editing by several countries. In the absence of regulatory harmony, researchers in some countries will have the ability to use genome editing in food animals, while others will not, resulting in disparate access to these tools, and ultimately the potential for global trade disruptions.
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