Our dad doesn't have horns either

Geneticists have bred hornless bulls

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

Horns that grow in cattle require additional space in the stalls, and most importantly – lead to dangerous injuries. Breeders have already bred several fully-bred breeds, in which even adult bulls remain hornless: Russian, East Finnish, British redpole. On the other hand, they are not as productive as many other breeds. By breeding them, the horns are often cut down or even cauterized at an early age, stopping their growth in such a painful way. All this keeps the need for the creation of new dairy and meat breeds. 

Back in 2014, the biotech startup Recombinetics managed to introduce "hornless genes" into an animal cell, making it homozygous for the PC Celtic POLLED allele. The cell was cloned and, having planted a donor cow in the uterus, they received a naked calf. When he grew up, the scientists took his sperm and artificially inseminated several cows, obtaining offspring – five calves, completely healthy and preserved one hundred percent of their young. Alison Van Eenennaam and her colleagues from the University of California at Davis write about this in an article published in the journal Nature Biotechnology (Young et al., Genomic and phenotypic analyses of six offspring of a genome-edited hornless bul). 

A horned bull of the control group surrounded by two hornless – descendants of the GM animal. A picture from the press release UC Davis.

The authors are confident that in the future the offspring of these animals will remain healthy, and the method can be used to breed cows of a wide variety of breeds. Formally, these animals remain GM organisms, but the genes that determined their new trait are completely borrowed from ordinary cows of other breeds. Therefore, in fact, they are a complete analogue of animals obtained by traditional breeding methods. This moment can significantly facilitate the necessary procedures for the approval of new breeds by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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