The world's first gene-knocking somatic cell clone dog was born.

Recently, the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with Beijing Shino Valley Biotech Co., Ltd. and China Agricultural University, combined CRISPR/Cas9 with somatic cell nuclear transplantation technology to successfully build the world's first gene-knocking somatic cell cloning dog model.
dogs are one of the earliest animals to be domesticated.
thousands of years, dogs as human companions, used in home care, hunting, guide, police and rescue and other work.
dogs are very similar to humans in terms of nutritional metabolism, physiological anatomy, and found that dogs have more than 200 kinds of genetic diseases similar to human genetic diseases, so dogs are also the ideal experimental animals to study human physiology and disease mechanism.
the combination of CRISPR/Cas9 and somatic cell nuclear transplantation technology makes it possible to build more models that simulate complex human diseases, which will provide new experimental animal models for the development of new treatments and drugs for human diseases, as well as accelerate the development of new varieties of genetically benign dogs.
team selected the ApoE gene to build a cardiovascular disease model and provide a more effective large animal model for atherosclerosis research. First,
, as in the previous method of building the MSTN gene to knock out dogs, by injecting mRNA into the dog's fertilized egg cell to edit the ApoE gene of the dog, and finally succeeded in obtaining two ApoE gene knockout dogs, "apple" (male dog) and "gourd" (mother dog).
although the two gene knockout dogs were edited at the ApoE gene site, the two dogs' gene editing methods were different, in which the "gourd" editing method did not cause a transcoding mutation, not the ideal model.
to solve the problem of different gene editing methods in crispR/Cas9 fertilized egg cell injections, the researchers went on to experiment with somatic cell cloning.
ApoE gene knockout dog "apple" ear skin fibroblasts as nuclear transplant donor cells for somatic cell cloning, transplanted surrogacy receptors 4, of which 2 successfully pregnant and gave birth to three puppies, respectively named "Dragon Dragon", "Xixi" and "Nono."
marks China becoming the second country after South Korea to independently master the technology of canine cell cloning, and is also the world's first gene knockout somatic cell cloning dog.
combining CRISPR/Cas9 with somatic cell cloning technology, a large number of animal models with the same genetic background can be obtained in a short period of time.
successfully obtained three atherosclerosis model dogs with the same genetic information as Apple in six months through this technology.
research published in Journal of Genetics and Genomics.
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