Vet World Vol.10 November-2017 Article-14
Review Article
Veterinary World, 10(11): 1361-1366
https://doi.org/10.14202/vetworld.2017.1361-1366
Advances in genome editing for improved animal breeding: A review
2. Division of Animal Genetics and Breeding, Faculty of Veterinary Sciences and Animal Husbandry, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, Srinagar - 190 006, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
Background and Aim: Since centuries, the traits for production and disease resistance are being targeted while improving the genetic merit of domestic animals, using conventional breeding programs such as inbreeding, outbreeding, or introduction of marker-assisted selection. The arrival of new scientific concepts, such as cloning and genome engineering, has added a new and promising research dimension to the existing animal breeding programs. Development of genome editing technologies such as transcription activator-like effector nuclease, zinc finger nuclease, and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats systems begun a fresh era of genome editing, through which any change in the genome, including specific DNA sequence or indels, can be made with unprecedented precision and specificity. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity of intensification in the frequency of desirable alleles in an animal population through gene-edited individuals more rapidly than conventional breeding. The specific research is evolving swiftly with a focus on improvement of economically important animal species or their traits all of which form an important subject of this review. It also discusses the hurdles to commercialization of these techniques despite several patent applications owing to the ambiguous legal status of genome-editing methods on account of their disputed classification. Nonetheless, barring ethical concerns gene-editing entailing economically important genes offers a tremendous potential for breeding animals with desirable traits.
Keywords: animal breeding, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats /Cas9, genome editing, transcription activator-like effector nuclease, zinc finger nucleases.
How to cite this article: Bhat SA, Malik AA, Ahmad SM, Shah RA, Ganai NA, Shafi SS, Shabir N (2017) Advances in genome editing for improved animal breeding: A review, Veterinary World, 10(11): 1361-1366.
Received: 08-08-2017 Accepted: 20-10-2017 Published online: 21-11-2017
Corresponding author: Nadeem Shabir E-mail: nadeem.shabir@skuastkashmir.ac.in
DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2017.1361-1366
Copyright: Bhat, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.