Several years ago, at a lab near a massive experimental farm in Guangdong Province in China, scientists prepped a whopping 4,008 genetically modified pig embryos for implantation into just 16 sows. It’s a numbers game these livestock engineers are familiar with; knowing that many embryos will not survive the procedure—and those that do may not make it through gestation or life beyond the womb—the researchers overproduce embryos and hope for the best.
Normally, a sow will have a litter of 10 piglets from 15–20 fertilized eggs, says Jinzeng Yang of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. “When we do transgenic nuclear transfer, you need to do 200 eggs. You don’t know how many are alive, how many are dead. If you are lucky you get two or three [piglets]. If not, you get nothing.”
As a member of the team developing these pigs, Yang kept his fingers crossed. About seven years ago, he had traveled to the lab in China to help set up the micromanipulator the researchers used for somatic cell nuclear transfer—the insertion of a genetically manipulated nucleus into an enucleated egg. Producing so many transgenic embryos is a labor-intensive process, but China has made considerable investments in livestock technology, and now the country has some of the largest and most advanced facilities in the world, says Yang. Whereas a transgenic livestock facility in the US might have around 20–50 sows, the experimental farm in China has hundreds.
…continue reading ‘The Superpowers of Genetically Modified Pigs’
Image: By Henk Caspers/Naturalis Biodiversity Center, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45358013
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