The Promises and Challenges of Precision Gene Editing in Animals of Agricultural Importance

We live in changing times—it has always been that way. But, now the times are changing more rapidly, dramatically, and unpredictably. The world must accommodate an increasing population that demands greater nutrition per person, better health, and greater energy consumption per person. As the world’s population rises to a predicted level of nearly 10 billion by 2050, most want sustainable growth without harm to the environment. The inconvenient truth is that it’s not possible with current agricultural, economic, and environmental operating systems (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014). The green revolution has essentially run its course (Conway and Toenniessen, 2000; Pingali, 2012; Stevenson et al., 2013). Even with technological gains, hunger worldwide has been increasing over the past decade. Global climate change coupled with a demand for increased nutrition in the developing world exacerbates the stress on agricultural production (Eisler and Lee, 2014). Hence, developing new methods of increasing the production of agricultural products, crops and animals, with minimal impact on the environment is essential (Godfray et al., 2010). Current approaches cannot meet demands. However, gene editing (Tan et al., 2012, 2013) (Figure 1)—which allows geneticists to introduce (introgress) any natural trait into any breed without the use of recombinant DNA—has the potential of improving animal genetics for meeting increasing agricultural and biomedical needs with minimal environmental impact. However, there are policy issues associated with gene-editing in livestock and in biomedical research that must be addressed for their real-world applications (Pauwels et al., 2014). We discuss several types of genome editing and current deficiencies in regulatory oversight that block enthusiasm for its adoption to agriculture. The Promises and Challenges of Precision Gene Editing in Animals of Agricultural Importance