by DocFeind on 5/3/25, 2:32 PM with 160 comments
by pazimzadeh on 5/4/25, 3:44 AM
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability of engineered vs unedited pigs. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
by nerdjon on 5/3/25, 8:40 PM
You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.
We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.
Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.
It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
by AzzyHN on 5/3/25, 5:05 PM
It's a shame the people who want to do this the most are the people who want to treat the pigs the worst, and who care the least about potential side effects in humans.
by SoftTalker on 5/3/25, 5:07 PM
Doesn't this just set the table for that rare subtype to become dominant?
by sinuhe69 on 5/4/25, 1:01 AM
Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.
So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
by comrade1234 on 5/3/25, 4:00 PM
by andsoitis on 5/3/25, 3:22 PM
by DesaiAshu on 5/3/25, 4:54 PM
by stavros on 5/3/25, 5:21 PM
Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat.
by walterbell on 5/4/25, 2:27 AM
What would be required to test retail pork product for the presence of this receptor?
Along the lines of https://www.plasticlist.org/report
We launched.. [a] project: to test 100 everyday foods for the presence of plastic chemicals.. We formed a team of four people, learned how this kind of chemical testing is performed, called more than 100 labs to find one that had the experience, quality standards, and turnaround time that we needed, collected hundreds of samples, shipped them, had them tested, painstakingly validated the results, and prepared them to share with you. Over time our effort expanded to nearly 300 food products. It took half a year and cost about $500,000.
by jbverschoor on 5/4/25, 5:25 AM
by pgryko on 5/4/25, 10:55 AM
by littlestymaar on 5/4/25, 7:42 AM
If there's already a variant of the virus that can overcome the edit, then without additional measures it will simply go from 1% of the case to 100% and the disease is going to be as prevalent as before and the benefit of the tech will be null after just a few years.
(Except that it will draw negative light on CRISPR-based gene editing , slowing down actual progress. That's the curse of GMO: companies making them for bad reasons and reducing collective trust in what is a very promising and important technology for long term food security)
by unfitted2545 on 5/3/25, 5:57 PM
by snthpy on 5/6/25, 8:47 AM
by lazystar on 5/3/25, 10:24 PM
by ksec on 5/3/25, 3:33 PM
And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.
by 486sx33 on 5/3/25, 4:40 PM
by ajma on 5/4/25, 12:34 AM