Generation and Evaluation of Myostatin Knock-out Rabbits and Goats Using CRISPR/Cas9 System

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2016 Jul 16

PMID 27417210

Citations 36

Authors

Rihong Guo

Yongjie Wan

Dan Xu

Libin Cui

Mingtian Deng

Guomin Zhang

Ruoxin Jia

Wenjun Zhou

Zhen Wang

Kaiping Deng

Mingrui Huang

Feng Wang

Yanli Zhang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Myostatin (Mstn) is a conserved negative regulator of skeletal muscle mass in mammals. However, whether precise disruption of Mstn in livestock can be achieved and safely used to improve meat productivity has not been proven. We applied CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate Mstn knock-out (KO) rabbits and goats and then analyzed the changes in their phenotypes to answer this question. We efficiently generated 24 Mstn KO rabbits out of 32 newborn infants after embryo injection with two sgRNAs targeting rabbit Mstn, and found that the Mstn KO rabbits exhibited increased birthweight and a significantly increase in the weight ratios of the quadriceps and biceps muscles to the whole body. Mstn KO also caused high probability of enlarged tongue phenomenon and severe health problems such as stillbirth and early stage death. Using the same method, one out of four goats was generated with edition at Mstn locus. The early stage growth rate of this goat outperformed the control goats. In conclusion, we efficiently generated Mstn KO rabbits and goats using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. However, Mstn KO causes severe health problems and may also have the same effects on other species. This safety issue must be studied further before applied to animal reproduction processes.

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