CRISPR to make just males

[Abizar Lakdawalla]

Just Boy Cattle

Jan 11, 2018

The University of California, Davis' Alison Van Eenennaam is using CRISPR to develop all-male cattle, Technology Review reports.

Her goal, it adds, is to develop bulls that will only sire male offspring in a project she's dubbed "Boys Only." That, Van Eenennaam says, would help beef ranchers out as males are bigger and grow faster and would make the industry more efficient.

She and her lab are going about it by inserting the SRY gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome, on the X chromosome, Tech Review says. In mammals, that gene, also called testis-determining factor, can make an animal physically male, even without a Y chromosome, it adds.

So far, Tech Review reports that Van Eenennaam and her team have been able to add SRY to an X chromosome in male skin cells, and that they next have to tackle doing that in a cattle embryo or cloning that altered skin cell. Any males made in this way are expected to be sterile, it notes.

Van Eenennaam has previously worked on developing hornless dairy cows by splicing a gene from Angus cattle, which naturally lack horns, into dairy-producing Holsteins.

[Cathal Garvey]

More interesting would be to do the same to Birds to get female-only laying hens, and perhaps spare 50% of chicks from immediate murder for being born the wrong sex.

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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Gordana Ostojic]

And of course the best would be to finally get meat-growing from tissue culture (maybe diybio can work on bacterial production of growth factors?). Not to mention that doing work there would help growing organs for people.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Jan 11, 2018 4:01 PM, "Gordana Ostojic" <gordana....@gmail.com> wrote:

And of course the best would be to finally get meat-growing from tissue culture (maybe diybio can work on bacterial production of growth factors?).

Or cattle without brains.

[Gordana Ostojic]

Again, question of top - down or bottom - up. This is an old chemistry/mat sci question.

Anyway, does anyone know about bioengineering of fetal bovine serum equivalent? 

[Abizar Lakdawalla]

Does not answer your question directly but Eric Espinosa introduced us to FetalGro at BioCurious, it is bovine serum based but substantially cheaper than fetal bovine serum.

https://www.rmbio.com/fetalgro-bovine-growth-serum-bgs

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[Patrik D'haeseleer]

On Thursday, January 11, 2018 at 4:36:25 PM UTC-8, Gordana Ostojic wrote:

Again, question of top - down or bottom - up. This is an old chemistry/mat sci question.

Anyway, does anyone know about bioengineering of fetal bovine serum equivalent? 

Mark Post, who developed the first "Cultured Beef" burger, told me that they did develop a good animal-free growth medium for the bovine muscle cells they're growing. Don't know the details, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a patent out there somewhere...

Patrik

[Cathal Garvey]

I remember seeing ads for recombinant FBS years ago while working in a regular lab, I'm sure it exists already? The draw for overfunded labs is consistency and reproducibility, of course, but in principle it should be cheaper if done at scale, too.

[Gordana Ostojic]

They did it without FBS but no patents that I could find so probably not very successful. University of Amsterdam, Dr. Klaas Hellingwerf was in charge of growth media and he moved to other things. 

I did find cellastim recombinant albumin and sericin from silkworm cocoon https://www.nature.com/articles/srep31516 that look promising.