UK Researchers Developing Influenza-Resistant Birds

New submitter ravensmith0821 writes: UK researchers are working on disease-resistant chickens, adding a gene to eggs before they hatch that renders the bird less susceptible to avian influenza. Reuters reports: "Their research, which has been backed by the UK government and top chicken companies, could potentially prevent repeats of this year's wipeout: 48 million chickens and turkeys killed because of the disease since December in the United States alone. But these promising chickens - injected with a fluorescent protein to distinguish them from normal birds in experiments - won't likely gatecrash their way into poultry production any time soon. Health regulators around the world have yet to approve any animals bred as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for use in food because of long-standing safety and environmental concerns."

Comments

Re:One has to wonder why they don't have that gene

[swb]

How historically widespread is avian flu? Is it something that has existed in nature and been a risk in regions where chickens are raised for food? If avian flu is a new phenomenon or wasn't very common, then why would you expect resistence to it to have developed already?

I think the other problem is that the current industrial farming paradigm for chickens has probably reduced the genetic diversity of chickens a lot. It may be that over the last 50 years that intensive selective breeding for weight or egg production or whatever the industrial attributes used for chicken farming may have accidentally bred out resistence to all manner of diseases while selecting for other qualities.

Geographic dispersion of chicken husbandry may also have limited its spread as well as produced enough minor genetic diversity that a virulent strain of the virus couldn't get established.

It's also possible that chickens breed fast enough that reproduction is a kind of resistence to it. If you can reproduce at fast enough rate, you might produce offspring with natural resistence to prevelant strains of influenza and these birds would grow to dominate.

Influenza also seems to be one of those viruses that mutates enough that natural resistence is difficult to develop in suceptable mammals for all variants of it.