People were Selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to create more desirable pets. The novel startup entitled The Los Angeles Project is aimed at accelerating this process with genetic engineering to create rabbits shining in the obscure, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and perhaps one day of real unicorns.
The project in Los Angeles is the idea of Biohacker Jos Zayner, who in 2017 publicly injected CRISPR tools for gene editing during the conference in San Francisco and live. “I want to lend a hand people genetically modify” She said then. She gave it too Feces transplant ia DIY Covid Vaccine And he is the founder and general director of Odin, a company that sells home sets of genetic engineering.
Now Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think that as a human species it is a kind of our moral prerogative to align animals,” he says.
Zayner says that co -founder of the biotechnology entrepreneur Cathy Cathy Tie. The name of the company based in Austin is a nod to another controversial effort-Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb during World War II.
Photo: Los Angeles project
Over the past year, the Los Angeles project has been operating in Stealth mode, while his five -person team experiments on embryos from frogs, fish, hamsters and rabbits. They used CRISPR to remove genes and insert new ones – the latter are more technically difficult to achieve. They also test the less known technique known as integration through the limiter or Remi enzyme, in terms of integration of a new DNA with embryos. Making these modifications at the embryo level changes the genetic composition of the resulting animal.
The band used CRISPR to add a gene to the rabbit embryos, thanks to which they produce green fluorescent protein or GFP. Zayner says that this week they intend to move designed embryos to women. If everything goes well, the company will have glowing bunnies in a month. (Rabbits have a pregnancy period of only 31 to 33 days.)
They will not be the first shining animals ever created. GFP is widely used by scientists to visual tracking and monitoring of genes or cellular processes in the body, often for disease examination. Scientists previously created fluorescent rodents, monkeys, dogs, cats and rabbits, but none of these animals were created for commercial purposes. But the Los Angeles project designs glowing bunnies and other animals for sale to consumers. “I think that animal space is huge and completely underestimated,” says Zayner.