Back

One-step multiple site-specific base editing by direct embryo injection for precision and pyramid pig breeding

Song, R.; Wang, Y.; Zheng, Q.; Yao, J.; Cao, C.; Wang, Y.; Zhao, J.

2020-08-27 genetics
10.1101/2020.08.26.267948 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Precise and simultaneous acquisition of multiple beneficial alleles in the genome to improve pig performance are pivotal for making elite breeders. Cytidine base editors (CBEs) have emerged as powerful tools for site-specific single nucleotide replacement. Here, we compare the editing efficiency of four CBEs in porcine embryonic cells and embryos to show that hA3A-BE3-Y130F and hA3A-eBE3-Y130F consistently results in higher base-editing efficiency and lower toxic effects to in vitro embryo development. We also show that zygote microinjection of hA3A-BE3-Y130F results in one-step generation of pigs (3BE pigs) harboring C-to-T point mutations, including a stop codon in CD163 and in MSTN and induce beneficial allele in IGF2. The 3BE pigs showed improved growth performance, hip circumference, food conversion rate. Our results demonstrate that CBEs can mediate high throughput genome editing by direct embryo microinjection. Our approach allows immediate introduction of novel alleles for beneficial traits in transgene-free animals for pyramid breeding.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.