You may not want to know what’s in the sausages you buy.
But at Washington State University, they know the German sausage they made came from five two-year-old gene-edited pigs.
One of the aims of the project was to demonstrate that gene-edited livestock are safe to eat.
The report did not say what trait the gene editing was intended to accomplish.
The Food and Drug Administration gave approval to the pork produced by the research team at the School of Molecular Biosciences and processed into sausage at the university’s meat lab.
The pigs were originally gene-edited in a way that would enable researchers to use them to sire offspring with traits from another male pig.
Known as surrogate sires, this technology first gene-edits male animals to be sterile by knocking out a gene called NANOS2 that is specific to male fertility.
These animals can then be implanted with another male’s stem cells that create sperm with that male’s desired traits to be passed on to the next generation.
Essentially a high-tech form of selective breeding, surrogate sire technology can greatly expand dissemination of valuable genetics in livestock.
It has the potential to not just improve meat quality but the health and resilience of livestock in the face of changing environmental conditions, a critical goal for increasing protein sources in developing nations, the researchers said.
The surrogate sires’ progeny, which are themselves not gene-edited, have not yet been reviewed by the FDA for possible inclusion in the food chain.
Only one other organization, Acceligen, has had a gene-edited animal receive the FDA approval to enter the food supply.
In 2020, the FDA made a low-risk determination for products made from “Slick-Haired Cattle” who are gene-edited to have coats that increase the animals’ resilience to higher temperatures.
Other companies have had genetically-modified animals approved by the FDA, but the approach was transgenic which is a different technology involving inserting DNA from outside species into the genome of an organism.
