Scientists have designs on animals of many colors
Print Edition
CHINESE scientists have come up with a way of breeding different colors of sheep.
Researchers in Urumqi, capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, have bred five sheep with different colors using a gene editing technique they term CRISPR-Cas9.
At the Xinjiang Academy of Zootechnical Science, the sheep are eye-catching — two of them carry black and white fur like cows, two are black with white spots like spotty dogs, while the other is brown and white like unstirred cappuccino.
“The lambs, born in March, have become our lovely pets,” said Liu Mingjun, head of the research team.
Liu said it was the first time scientists had been able to alter the coat colors of large animals. Previous experiments were limited to mice.
With CRISPR-Cas9, consumers will be able to buy more wool products in various colors with no dye needed, and people can also order pets with customized coloring, he said.
Liu’s team selected ASIP, a key gene affecting the color of a sheep’s fleece, to edit for the desired colors.
CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was chosen as the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year by the US journal Science as it acts as a type of molecular scissors able to selectively trim away unwanted genome parts and replace them with new DNA stretches. Cas9 is a specific kind of CRISPR-associated protein, with which genetic patterns can be altered by genome modification.
“The application to large animals indicates more strains of animals, not limited to livestock, will be developed via the approach, with different patterns not limited to coat colors,” Liu said. “Compared with traditional gene mutation approaches in which researchers take decades to breed a new strain, gene editing is much more effective.”
His team last year designed 38 sheep that outperformed ordinary ones in muscle and wool growth. The sheep will be further studied for genetic stability during reproduction.
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