People were Cats and dogs selectively breed for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to accelerate this process with genetic engineering in order to actually make rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs and possibly one day.
The Los Angeles project is the idea of Biohacker Josie Zayner, who publicly injected itself into the gene machining tool in 2017 Crisp During a conference in San Francisco and Livestream. “I want to help people to change genetically.” she said back then. She also gave herself one Fecal transplantation and a DIY COVID vaccine And is the founder and CEO of The Odin, a company that sells genetic engineering kits for home.
Now Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “I think as a human species, it is a kind of moral privilege to improve animals,” she says.
With the biotech entrepreneur Cathy Tie, a former Thiel scholarship holder, the Los Angeles project is about making animals that are “more complex and interesting and more beautiful and unique” than that currently exist, says Zayner. The name of the company based in Austin is an allusion to a further controversial effort das Manhattan project, which developed the first atomic bomb during the Second World War.
Last year the Los Angeles project operated on stealth mode, while his five-person team experimented with embryos of frogs, fish, hamsters and rabbits. You used Crispr to delete genes and insert new ones – the latter are more difficult to achieve. They also test a less well-known technology that is known as a restriction-enzyme-mediated integration or remi to integrate new DNA in embryos. If you make these modifications at the embryo level, the genetic composition of the resulting animal changes.
The team used Crispr to add rabbit embryos to produce green -fluorescent protein or GFP. Zayner says they want to transfer to female rabbits to female rabbits this week. If everything goes well, the company will have glowing baby rabbits in a month. (Rabbits have a pregnancy time of only 31 to 33 days.)
They will not be the first bright animals ever created. GFP is usually used by scientists to visually pursue and monitor genetic activity or cellular processes in an organism, often to examine diseases. Researchers have previously made fluorescent rodents, monkeys, dogs, cats and rabbits, but none of these animals were created for commercial purposes. However, the Los Angeles project creates glowing rabbits and other animals to sell them to consumers. “I think the pet room is huge and completely undervalued,” says Zayner.
