Exhibition Poultry Magazine

I receive all types of poultry news in my email inbox, usually daily, and one article in particular caught my eye. It was on the subject of ongoing research of using CRISPR gene editing to fight avian influenza. An excerpt . . . “Our colleagues discovered that one of the chicken host proteins used by the flu virus is ANP32A. At first, we didn’t want to completely remove the ANP32A protein. We thought that by changing the protein very subtly, changing two amino acids of the protein, the flu virus would not be able to interact with ANP32A and grow in the cell.” This passage is from an ar􏰀cle appearing in this month’s edition of Canadian Poultry.
Since I am not a fan of human genetically modified anything, I researched the function of the ANP32A gene. The best explanation I could find online was: “A multifunctional protein that is involved in the regulation of many processes including tumor suppression, apoptosis, cell cy- cle progression or transcription.” (from: https://www.uniprot.org/). Those all seem like important processes. I think ‘multifunctional’ might be the key word there.
According to Christine Baes, chair of the De- partment of Animal Biosciences at the University of Guelph, the study’s findings are a “huge breakthrough”. But she admits that, “Gene editing is not a silver bullet. You need to under- stand the genetic consequences of the trait. Otherwise unintended consequences are possible.” I believe that last part is what most of us are worried about. Baes further stated, “what’s hindering the Canadian agricultural industry from applying gene editing is regulatory in nature, not technical in nature.” Well thank good- ness for regulations! I’ll go back to the same old argument—why are millions, possible billions, of dollars being spent on gene editing research and nothing on building natural disease resistance in our poultry? Just my opinion. Ann Charles, Editor