Employees of the Rosslyn Institute, where Dolly the sheep was born in 1998, are busy with an ambitious new challenge: creating a genetically edited chicken that would be immune to avian flu. It is reported that the appearance of the first such chicken will occur this year.
Scientists from Rosslyn Institute (Scotland) this year intend to create the world's first genetically edited chicken that would be absolutely resistant to influenza. Such ambitious plans are reported by Wendy Barclay, professor of virology at Imperial College London, who is serving as co-leader of the project. The birds' DNA will be altered using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR.
According to the professor, the research team plans to change the ANP32 gene, which encodes a protein through which infection usually occurs, which will make the chickens immune to the disease. Previous research by Barclay and her colleagues at Imperial College in 2016 demonstrated that this particular protein is responsible for infection with the flu virus.
Now, teamed up with scientists from Scotland, Barclay intends to use CRISPR technology to edit chicken DNA in such a way as to change only one part of this key protein, leaving the rest of the bird's genome unchanged. The scientist emphasizes that this is the smallest change that will stop the spread of the virus.
The death toll in the last flu pandemic in 2009-2010, caused by the H1N1 strain and considered relatively mild, ranges from 200,000 to half a million worldwide, and more than 40 died from the infamous Spanish flu, which spread worldwide in 1918. million. The World Health Organization (WHO) has listed a new flu outbreak as a major global threat in 2019, and has estimated the cost of its occurrence at about $ 60 billion a year, so the possibility of the birth of a "safe" bird can be very useful.
At the same time, according to Barclay, one of the main obstacles to the widespread adoption of this technology may be people's fears and distrust of genetically edited food. People have been eating familiar foods throughout the agricultural tradition, she says, and can get nervous about switching to "gene" foods.
Scientists from the Roslin Institute became known all over the world in 1996: it was there that the famous Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal in history, was born. In addition, the researchers at this research center have already been editing the pig genome to make them resistant to the virus, too.
Dmitry Mazalevsky
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