Can genome-editing technology revive the idea of genetically modified livestock?

Four years ago, Scott Fahrenkrug saw an ABC News segment about the dehorning of dairy cows, a painful procedure that makes the animals safer to handle. The shaky undercover video showed a black-and-white Holstein heifer moaning and bucking as a farmhand burned off its horns with a hot iron.

Fahrenkrug, a molecular geneticist then at the University of Minnesota, thought he had a way to solve the problem. He could create cows without horns. He could save farmers money. And by eliminating the dairy industrys most unpleasant secret, he might even score a public relations success for genetic engineering.

The technology Fahrenkrug believes could do all this is called genome editing (see Genome Surgery and Genome Editing). A fast, precise new way of altering DNA, its been sweeping through biotechnology labs. Researchers have used it to change the genes of mice, zebrafish, and monkeys, and it is being tested as way to treat human diseases like HIV (see Can Gene Therapy Cure HIV?).

With livestock, gene editing offers some extraordinary possibilities. At his startup, Recombinetics, located in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fahrenkrug thinks he can create blue-ribbon dairy bulls possessing traits not normally found in those breeds but present in other cattle, such as lack of horns or resistance to particular diseases. Such molecular breeding, he says, would achieve the same effects as nature might, only much faster. In short, an animal could be edited to have the very best genes its species can offer.

That could upend the global livestock industry. Companies could patent these animals just as they do genetically modified soybeans or corn. Entrepreneurs are also ready to challenge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has never approved a GMO food animal. They say gene editing shouldnt be regulated if its used to merely swap around traits within a species. Were talking about genes that already exist in a species we already eat, says Fahrenkrug.

The use of the technology remains experimental and far from the food chain. But some large breeding companies are starting to invest. There may be an opportunity for a different public acceptance dialogue and different regulations, says Jonathan Lightner, R&D chief of the U.K. company Genus, which is the worlds largest breeder of pigs and cattle and has paid for some of Recombinetics laboratory research. This isnt a glowing fish. Its a cow that doesnt have to have its horns cut off.

GMO Bust

To date, GMO food animals have been a complete bust. After the first mice genetically engineered with viral DNA appeared in the 1970s, a parade of other modified animals followed, including sheep that grow extra wool thanks to a mouse gene, goats whose udders made spider silk, and salmon that mature twice as quickly as normal. But such transgenicsanimals incorporating genes from other speciesmostly never made it off experimental farms.

Opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) gathered millions of signatures to stop frankenfoods, and the FDA has held off approving such animals as food. AquaBounty Technologies, the company that made the fast-growing transgenic salmon, has spent 18 years and $70 million trying to get the fish cleared. Two years ago, the University of Guelph, in Ontario, euthanized its herd of enviropigs, engineered with an E. coli gene so they pooped less phosphorus, after giving up hope of convincing regulators.

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On the Horns of the GMO Dilemma