MOSCOW, Idaho — Jon Oatley is trying to devise ways to feed a growing world and to that end, he has genetically modified pigs to be sterile.
“We’re working on a project that we call ‘surrogate sires,'” Oatley said. “What it is, is we’re trying to generate male livestock — cattle as well as pigs — that don’t produce their own sperm.”
With the use of an advanced gene editing technique called CRISPR, famously used in next-generation cancer research, Oatley said he is able to “knock out” the gene that creates the starting point for sperm production. Once the sterile pig matures, Oatley said, researchers can inject it with the genetic material of a different pig with superior traits, allowing the genetically modified hog to act as a surrogate father for a pig with desirable genetics.
“There’s a stem cell that exists that will produce sperm over and over and over and over,” Oatley said. “We try to take the stem cell out of a male that we would deem to have elite genetics (and) transfer the stem cell in the recipient, so that stem cell can re-establish sperm production over and over and over, in that recipient.”
Oatley explained while livestock all over the world exhibit a variety of traits that allow them to survive in different environments, they don’t always have other qualities breeders deem to be desirable, like high quality meat or growth potential. In the past, he said, people would bring in a male — or sperm from a male — with these traits to mingle with the genetics of a female that was adapted to survive that environment. While this may help produce hybrid offspring with a combination of genetics that are both desirable and help the animal survive, it is often a costly and clumsy process, not to mention time-consuming. Oatley said it usually takes dozens, if not, hundreds of generations before desirable traits manifest. He said having a group of sterile males who are able to transmit the genetic material of one superior male allows scientists to influence populations more quickly and on a grander scale than merely breeding for those traits.
Oatley mentioned South American cows by way of example.
“They don’t always have the production characteristics that you’re looking for, like growth or milk production or palatability of the meat — because they’ve been selected for disease resistance,” Oatley said. “Now you can introduce that genetics through this strategy, rather than having to take the animals and ship them around the world.”
With the world population on track to reach 10 billion by the year 2050, Oatley said humanity is in desperate need of more efficient practices to maximize the food supply. Oatley said it is not feasible to merely produce more food, in part because the more the population grows the less land there is for production. The coming food crisis — and other global concerns such as global warming — can begin to be addressed at the dinner table.
