China's Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals
China’s western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.
Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu’s colleagues say. “The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years,” his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.
That changed when the researched adopted the new gene-customizing technology called CRISPR–Cas9, a technique developed in the U.S. about three years ago. CRISPR uses enzymes to precisely locate and snip out segments of DNA, much like a word-processor finding and deleting a given phrase—a process known as “gene-editing.” Although it is not the first tool scientists have used to tweak DNA, it is by far more precise and cheaper than past technologies. The apparent ease of this powerful method now raises both tantalizing possibilities and pressing ethical questions.
Once the goat team began to deploy CRISPR, their progress was rapid. In September Qu and 25 other collaborating scientists in China published the details of their research in Nature’s Scientific Reports. In early-stage goat embryos they had successfully deleted two genes that suppressed both hair and muscle growth. The result was 10 goat kids exhibiting both larger muscles and longer fur—designer livestock—that, so far, show no other abnormalities. “We believed gene-modified livestock will be commercialized after we demonstrate [that it] is safe,” predicts Qu, who envisions this work as a simple way to boost the sale of goat meat and cashmere sweaters from Shaanxi.
The research is just one of a recent flurry of papers by Chinese scientists that describe CRISPR-modified goats, sheep, pigs, monkeys and dogs, among other mammals. In October, for instance, researchers from the country discussed their work to create unusually muscled beagles in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. Such research has been supported via grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Science and Technology as well as provincial governments.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of Chinese institutions in both research hubs like Beijing and far-flung provincial outposts have enthusiastically deployed CRISPR. “It’s a priority area for the Chinese Academy of Sciences,” says Minhua Hu, a geneticist at the Guangzhou General Pharmaceutical Research Institute and one of the beagle researchers. A colleague, Liangxue Lai of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, adds that “China’s government has allocated a lot of financial support in genetically modified animals in both [the] agriculture field [and the] biomedicine field.”
This is raising a number of ethical worries about making new life forms. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos can become “permanent”—that is, they are made to the DNA that will be passed onto future generations. For each zygote or embryo that scientists successfully transform, typically dozens, if not hundreds, of others do not work. But the technology is rapidly improving. “What is different about CRISPR is that the technology is vastly more efficient and so the possibility of it being practiced widely is that much more real,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School. Past efforts to manipulate the genetic code of life have been slower, more cumbersome and more unpredictable. “The ethical concerns are now upon us because the technology is real,” he adds.
This applies to CRISPR experiments to “edit” the DNA of all plants and animals—as well as in the future, perhaps, humans, if scientists like Qu further hone the technique. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos become “permanent”; that is, they enter the germ line and will be passed onto future generations.
by Christina Larson, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Zou Qingjian and Lai Liangxue
China’s western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.
Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu’s colleagues say. “The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years,” his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.That changed when the researched adopted the new gene-customizing technology called CRISPR–Cas9, a technique developed in the U.S. about three years ago. CRISPR uses enzymes to precisely locate and snip out segments of DNA, much like a word-processor finding and deleting a given phrase—a process known as “gene-editing.” Although it is not the first tool scientists have used to tweak DNA, it is by far more precise and cheaper than past technologies. The apparent ease of this powerful method now raises both tantalizing possibilities and pressing ethical questions.
Once the goat team began to deploy CRISPR, their progress was rapid. In September Qu and 25 other collaborating scientists in China published the details of their research in Nature’s Scientific Reports. In early-stage goat embryos they had successfully deleted two genes that suppressed both hair and muscle growth. The result was 10 goat kids exhibiting both larger muscles and longer fur—designer livestock—that, so far, show no other abnormalities. “We believed gene-modified livestock will be commercialized after we demonstrate [that it] is safe,” predicts Qu, who envisions this work as a simple way to boost the sale of goat meat and cashmere sweaters from Shaanxi.
The research is just one of a recent flurry of papers by Chinese scientists that describe CRISPR-modified goats, sheep, pigs, monkeys and dogs, among other mammals. In October, for instance, researchers from the country discussed their work to create unusually muscled beagles in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. Such research has been supported via grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Science and Technology as well as provincial governments.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of Chinese institutions in both research hubs like Beijing and far-flung provincial outposts have enthusiastically deployed CRISPR. “It’s a priority area for the Chinese Academy of Sciences,” says Minhua Hu, a geneticist at the Guangzhou General Pharmaceutical Research Institute and one of the beagle researchers. A colleague, Liangxue Lai of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, adds that “China’s government has allocated a lot of financial support in genetically modified animals in both [the] agriculture field [and the] biomedicine field.”
This is raising a number of ethical worries about making new life forms. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos can become “permanent”—that is, they are made to the DNA that will be passed onto future generations. For each zygote or embryo that scientists successfully transform, typically dozens, if not hundreds, of others do not work. But the technology is rapidly improving. “What is different about CRISPR is that the technology is vastly more efficient and so the possibility of it being practiced widely is that much more real,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School. Past efforts to manipulate the genetic code of life have been slower, more cumbersome and more unpredictable. “The ethical concerns are now upon us because the technology is real,” he adds.
This applies to CRISPR experiments to “edit” the DNA of all plants and animals—as well as in the future, perhaps, humans, if scientists like Qu further hone the technique. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos become “permanent”; that is, they enter the germ line and will be passed onto future generations.
by Christina Larson, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Zou Qingjian and Lai Liangxue
