Sunday, December 31, 2017

'Flying horse' to be born in Argentina by 2019

IBTimes.sg - Full Article

Armed with genetically altered embryos, scientists all set to produce cloned 'Dolly' of horse

By Soorya Kiran NN
December 31, 2017 01:02 +08

Flying horse is limited to fairy tales or epics but soon a super jumper horse will be born with tweaks in its DNA being undertaken by an Argentine biotech firm, which has already achieved a breakthrough in cloning polo ponies.

These genetically engineered super horses will be faster, stronger and high and far jumpers as scientists were able to use a powerful DNA editing technique called 'Crispr' to redesign the genomes of cloned horses.

Crispr, the short form of 'clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats', is a technique where a hybrid of protein and ribonucleic acid (RNA) works as an efficient hunt-and-cut system. Pioneered by molecular biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the technique could work well in animals, including humans, to carry out genome editing.

The horse genome's 32 pairs of chromosomes, written in 2.7  billion base pairs of DNA, were sequenced and published in 2009 and now the team of scientists from Khairon Biotech, a specialist equine cloning facility in Buenos Aires, have successfully worked on boosting the myostatin gene sequence which is crucial to muscle development, endurance and galloping speed of the best breed of horse. Armed with healthy embryos already, they are planning to implant one into a surrogate mother within two years...

Read more here:
http://www.ibtimes.sg/flying-horse-be-born-argentina-by-2019-22481

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