Remember the 1990's thriller movie "Man's Best Friend"? Where a genetically mutated dog escape from the lab of a mad with the help of an animal rights advocate. It's now happening according to a report from "MIT Technology Review"
Scientist said that using a naturally occurring DNA mutation in the myostatin gene results to more muscled whippets. They have found out how to simulate this gene mutation in other breeds of dogs and have used it to create beagles that have twice the normal muscle mass.
Liangxue Lai, a researcher with the Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said “The dogs have more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police and military applications.”
Lai and her colleagues submitted the results of their study last week in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. They said that they intend to create dogs with other DNA mutations, including ones that mimic human diseases such as Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy.
“The goal of the research is to explore an approach to the generation of new disease dog models for biomedical research.” “Dogs are very close to humans in terms of metabolic, physiological, and anatomical characteristics.”
What they did was directly inject gene-editing chemical agents into more than 60 dog embryos that is designed to destroy the dogs’ myostatin genes that naturally inhibit their muscle growth.
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