Are you ready for modern-made ‘GMO’ bacon? With the near-future possibility of gene-modified pigs coming to your local grocery store, this may be yet another biotech reality.
Molecular biologist Jin-Soo Kim at Seoul National University showed off pictures of hogs in the publication Nature just weeks ago. These genetically modified pigs were made to have bizarrely large backsides, considered the most edible part of the pig.
In the article, Kim’s team, from Korea and China, looked at a mutation in an extremely muscular variety of cattle called the Belgian Blue wherein a gene that ordinarily inhibits muscle growth gets switched off. Using a gene-editing technique called TALEN, the researchers induced a similar mutation in their pigs to make them, well, porkier.
It stands to note that gene-editing is already bypassing many regulatory checkpoints because it isn’t considered genetic engineering. Though, clearly it smacks of it in every conceivable way.
Cyranoski from Nature explains:
“Key to creating the double-muscled pigs is a mutation in the myostatin gene (MSTN). MSTN inhibits the growth of muscle cells, keeping muscle size in check. But in some cattle, dogs and humans, MSTN is disrupted and the muscle cells proliferate, creating an abnormal bulk of muscle fibres.
To introduce this mutation in pigs, Kim used a gene-editing technology called a TALEN, which consists of a DNA-cutting enzyme attached to a DNA-binding protein. The protein guides the cutting enzyme to a specific gene inside cells, in this case in MSTN, which it then cuts. The cell’s natural repair system stitches the DNA back together, but some base pairs are often deleted or added in the process, rendering the gene dysfunctional.
The team edited pig fetal cells. After selecting one edited cell in which TALEN had knocked out both copies of the MSTN gene, Kim’s collaborator Xi-jun Yin, an animal-cloning researcher at Yanbian University in Yanji, China, transferred it to an egg cell, and created 32 cloned piglets.”