Base editing in pigs for precision breeding

Abstract

Pigs are one of the most important domesticated animals and have great value in agriculture and biomedicine. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are a dominant type of genetic variation among individual pigs and contribute to the formation of traits. Precision single base substitution provides a strategy for accurate genetic improvement in pig production with the characterization of functional SNPs and genetic variants in pigs. Base editing has recently been developed as the latest gene-editing tool that can directly make changes in single nucleotides without introducing double-stranded DNA breaks (DSBs), providing a promising solution for precise genetic modification in large animals. This review summarizes gene-editing developments and highlights recent genetic dissection related to SNPs in major economic traits which may have the potential to be modified using SNP-editing applications. In addition, limitations and future directions of base editing in pig breeding are discussed.

Keywords

base editing / genetic improvement / pigs / single nucleotide polymorphisms

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81671274, 31925036, 31272440, and 31801031), the National Transgenic Project of China (2016ZX08009003-006-007), and the Elite Youth Program of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (ASTIP-IAS05).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Ruigao Song, Yu Wang, Yanfang Wang, and Jianguo Zhao declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article is a review and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)