Gene editing creates virus-free piglets
Advance moves the animals one step closer to becoming organ donors for people
Pigs are a step closer to becoming organ donors for people.
Researchers used molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 to snip embedded viruses out of pig DNA. Removing the viruses — called porcine endogenous retroviruses, or PERVs — creates piglets that can’t pass the viruses on to transplant recipients, geneticist Luhan Yang and colleagues report online August 10 in Science.
Yang, a cofounder of eGenesis in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues had previously sliced 62 PERVs at a time from pig cells grown in the lab (SN: 11/14/15, p. 6). Many of the embedded viruses are already damaged and can’t make copies of themselves to pass on an infection. So in the new study, the researchers removed just 25 viruses that were still capable of infecting other cells.