BioProject

The common management practice of manually removing horns from cattle is an increasing animal welfare concern for consumers. More...

The common management practice of manually removing horns from cattle is an increasing animal welfare concern for consumers. Utilizing currently available polled (hornless) genetics to create fewer horned animals would take many generations since existing polled sires are primarily heterozygous animals with lower genetic merit than horned sires. An alternative strategy is to utilize gene editing technology to incorporate the polled allele into elite genetic backgrounds. Two gene edited polled bulls were created using TALENs (Carlson et al., 2016). One of these bulls was bred to Horned Hereford cows to evaluate the transmission of the polled allele to offspring. Six calves (1 female, 5 males) were born, heterozygous for the polled allele and lacking horns. Whole genome sequence reads for these animals are included, as well as sequences for purebred Horned Hereford and Hereford x Holstein contemporary controls. The long-term goals of this project are to provide empirical data on the phenotypic and genotypic durability of the polled genome edited trait, the health and development of offspring from genome edited animals, and the composition of animal products derived from the offspring of a genome edited bull and control bulls. This research will further our understanding of any novel risks associated with the use of genome editing in livestock. Less...