ZZ26011 Frankenfoods V01 160226

Super-cows and Frankenfoods ‘will feed the planet in future’

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Kaya Burgess - Science Correspondent

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It is time to shake off the fear of “Frankenfoods” and embrace the genetic editing of farm animals for disease-resistant, fast-growing super-cows and chickens, a science conference has heard.

In the future humans will eat meat and eggs and drink milk from animals for whom the natural selection of desirable traits has been sped up using cutting-edge techniques to make them “more efficient”, said Dr Jon Oatley, of the college of veterinary medicine at Washington State University.

It has, he said, been possible to produce bulls that are sterile and inject them with stem cells from a prize male with edited genes. The sterile bulls act as “surrogate sires”, producing sperm that carries the genetic material of the gene-edited bull.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is consulting on allowing food from gene-edited animals to be sold in Britain, having opened the door for genetically altered plants to be sold in supermarkets as soon as this year.

The techniques available are used to “accelerate” the selection of traits that occur naturally in an animal or plant, creating what are known as precisionbred organisms, or PBOs, Oatley said.

This is different from GMOs, genetically modified organisms, where material from other species is spliced into DNA to create “abnormal” and unnatural alterations, he said.

The GMO process prompted the coining of the word “Frankenfoods” from opponents in the 1990s, but modern techniques “don’t create foreign or abnormal things that could never arise in nature”, he said before a talk entitled “Harnessing tech solutions to nourish the world” at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Arizona.

The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 allows the sale of gene-edited plant products in England, but the government is consulting on secondary legislation to allow the same for animals. The act only permits genetic edits that “could have resulted from traditional processes alone”.

Humans have been interfering with the genetics of animals for years by selectively breeding cows, sheep, pigs and chickens that grow more quickly, produce more milk, develop thicker wool or lay more eggs, to produce offspring that share these traits, Oatley said.

Carrots, for example, are not naturally orange. Orange ones were created in the Netherlands in the 17th century by mixing yellow and purple varieties.

Modern gene-editing techniques allow scientists to perform the same process, but greatly sped up. It allows them to identify naturally occurring genes in an animal linked with faster growth or greater resistance to infections to ensure that the next generation is born with those traits and will pass them on.

The gene-editing process would not lead to the creation of anything outlandish, such as six-legged chickens or gigantic cows, Oatley said.

He said instead it would mean the breeding of pigs that are resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome and chickens that are resistant to avian influenza, minimising waste from animals that die. Cattle would reach adult size more quickly.

Oatley said: “If an animal takes two years to reach market weight, that’s two years of [consumption] and methane emission. What if we shorten that by a year? Now it has a 50 per cent reduction in its impact on the environment.

“We are also trying to overcome some of the things where traditional, conventional husbandry practices have reduced the welfare of animals.”

Farmers often cut the tails of sheep, known as “docking”, to prevent maggot infestations, while the beaks of chickens are trimmed to prevent them from violent pecking. However, scientists could find the genes that create naturally short tails or beaks.

Oatley added: “I think the fear and concerns in the public … is that GMO strategies were putting foreign DNA into the genome of animals, things that could never arise in nature, using ‘recombinant’ DNA, things you couldn’t bring along by breeding.”

He said those developing new geneediting techniques were trying to teach the public about the “new narrative”.

He said he had obtained authorisation in the US to make pork sausages from a pig whose DNA had been modified using the Crispr technique, which allows precise edits to DNA strands.

“I’ve had very little backlash,” he said.

“Most people are more than interested, more than willing to consume the product.”