Super-meat breed of pigs
Geneticists have created bodybuilding pigs modeled after famous cows
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked ScienceBelgian blue cows have become a legend of animal husbandry and an Internet meme:
centuries of artificial selection have created a real meat miracle (or maybe a monster?), able to boast muscles no worse than bodybuilding.
Photo: Robert Scarth (London, England), Wikimedia Commons – VM.It turned out to be easier to create the same pig athletes: having given up on classical breeding, Chinese geneticists directly changed their corresponding gene (a picture from the article by David Cyranoski Super-muscular pigs created by small genetic tweak, published in Nature News).
Strictly speaking, the power and meat of Belgian blues are manifestations of hyperplasia, an anomaly in which the body produces many times more muscle fibers. It occurs as a result of mutations in the MSTN gene, which encodes myostatin, a protein that suppresses the formation of muscle tissue. In humans, cows, pigs and other mammals – diploid organisms – a mutation even in one copy of the gene leads to a noticeable growth of muscle tissue, and in two it gives birth to monsters for the sake of the meat industry.
However, if the breeders moved step by step in creating the Belgian blue breed, Chinese geneticists achieved the same result on pigs with one precise intervention, directly "knocking out" the myostatin gene. What would have required at least decades of work was done in months. It was possible to "knock out" one of the MSTN genes in chromosomes using the TALEN method, after which they were placed in eggs and 32 pig clones were grown. Of course, not in all cases the process went smoothly: only 13 piglets survived to the age of eight months, but they are already ready to give offspring – muscular, almost devoid of fat.
However, fans of lard have nothing to worry about: so far, in no country in the world has a single genetically modified animal received permission to be used for food. Even the famous story of the AquAdvantage salmon breed, which, thanks to the improved regulation of the synthesis of growth factors, are able to gain weight much faster than usual, has been hanging "in nowhere": officials have been considering this issue for about 20 years.
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30.06.2015