Chickens without flu
The creators of Dolly the sheep will raise CRISPR chickens with immunity to the flu
Olga Dobrovidova, N+1
Scientists from the Scottish Roslin Institute, where they created the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, plan to use the CRISPR genetic editing method to edit the chicken genome so that the bird is invulnerable to influenza. Researchers hope to get the first chicken in 2019, says Reuters (Scientists make gene-edited chickens in bid to halt next pandemic).
The World Health Organization (WHO) has named a new flu pandemic as one of the global threats to humanity in 2019: according to the organization's estimates, one flu pandemic costs about $ 60 billion a year. Deaths from influenza can vary depending on the strain: Reuters notes that about half a million people died from the previous pandemic of 2009-2010 caused by a relatively mild strain of the H1N1 virus, and about 50 million people died from the famous "Spanish flu" in 1918. One of the ways the flu spreads is from wild birds to domestic ones, and those already infect people, primarily those working in agriculture.
As one of the project managers, Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London, told the agency, scientists plan to edit the ANP32 gene in birds, encoding a protein necessary for the influenza virus to infect the host organism. Laboratory experiments on cell cultures have shown that without this protein, cells cannot be infected with the influenza virus. The type and subtype of the virus are not specified in the note, but in a 2016 study in Nature we are talking about type A. In chickens, scientists plan to change part of the protein so that it gives the same effect.
"We have found a very small change that will stop the spread of the virus [from wild birds to humans through poultry]. If we could have prevented such a spread, we would have stopped the next flu pandemic at its source," Barclay said.
The first chick, according to the researcher, should hatch in 2019. Most of all, scientists worry that chicken producers and society's fears of "genetically edited food" will become a barrier to the spread of GM chickens.
The problem of the spread of influenza viruses among poultry is becoming more urgent: in 2018, Chinese scientists showed that the H7N9 and H7N2 avian influenza viruses, which were successfully fought by vaccinating chickens, have now acquired the ability to infect ducks – two new highly pathogenic varieties of the virus were found in these birds.
High-tech, though not genetically edited "blockchain chickens" are available to consumers today: the Chinese company ZhongAn Technology announced at the end of 2017 that it would add facial recognition technology to its GoGo Chicken service. This service allows you to record information about the growth of a chicken on an organic farm in a blockchain database, for example, data on its nutrition and movements around the farm. Before buying, the user can check this data, as well as monitor specific chickens throughout their growth time on the farm.
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