First Genetically Edited Cows Arrive at UC Davis
By Edward Ortiz,
Sacramento Bee
| 12. 20. 2015
Untitled Document
The two calves that grace a muddy pen on the UC Davis campus will never grow horns typical of their breed. Instead, they’ll always sport soft hair on the parts of their heads where hard mounds normally emerge.
Named Spotigy and Buri, the calves were designed in a petri dish at a Minnesota-based genetics lab, with the goal of making them easier to pack into pens and trucks without the nuisance of their horns taking up valuable space. Their offspring may also lack horns, and generations of hornless cows could follow, potentially saving the dairy and cattle industry millions of dollars, said Alison Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at UC Davis’ College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences who worked with the Minnesota lab Recombinetics.
This first-of-a-kind result of a process called genetic editing is a test run that’s expected to deeply impact the cattle and dairy industry and the entire food supply, Van Eenennaam said. It’s also part of a flurry of research looking at how to make cattle easier to maintain, transport and turned into food. The research...
Related Articles
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 07.04.2024
Biological models of human embryos that can develop heartbeats, spinal cords and other distinctive features will be governed by a code of practice in Britain to ensure that researchers work on them responsibly.
Made from stem cells, they mimic, to...
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.27.2024
Physician-scientist Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, has been a mainstay in the genome editing field for more than two decades. He trained at Stanford University Medical School before completing his residency and hematology/oncology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute...
By Peter Aldhous, Scientific American | 07.02.2024
In June a notice posted on the website of the journal Nature set a new scientific record. It withdrew what is now the most highly cited research paper ever to be retracted.
The study, published in 2002 by Catherine Verfaillie...
By Robert F. Service, Science | 07.04.2024
Image by Ed Uthman from Flickr
Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two gene therapy procedures that can treat and, in some cases essentially cure sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that causes pain and...