People have been Choose breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to produce more desirable pets. A new start-called Los Angeles project aims to speed up that process in genetic engineering to produce glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and maybe, one day, actual unicorns.
The Los Angeles project is Biohacker's brain Josie Zayner, who in 2017 publicly injected himself with the tool edited CRISPR At a conference in San Francisco and it livestreamed. “I want to help people genetically change themselves,” He said at that time. He was also given himself a Fecal transplant and a DIY COVID VACCINE and the founder and CEO of Odin, a company that sells genetic-engineering kits.
Now, Zayner wants to create the next generation of pets. “In my opinion, as a human species, it's kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals,” he said.
Contacting Biotech businessman Cathy Tie, a former Thiel Fellow, Los Angeles project is about making animals “more complex and interesting and beautiful and unique” than currently exists, Zayner said. The name of the Austin-based company nodded in another controversial effort-the Manhattan project, which formed the first atom bomb during WWII.
Photo: Project in Los Angeles
For the past year, the Los Angeles project operates in Stealth mode as its five-year team experimented with embryos from frogs, fish, hamsters, and rabbits. They used CrisPR to remove the genes and enter new ones – the latter was more difficult to achieve. They are also trying a smaller known method known as the restriction of enzyme mediated integration, or REMI, for incorporating new DNAs into embryos. Making these changes to the embryo level changes the genetic makeup of the resulting animal.
The team used CrisPR to add a gene to rabbit embryos to produce green fluorescent protein, or GFP. Zayner said it aims to move the embryo engineers to female rabbits this week. If all is well, the company will have glowing baby bunnies a month. (Rabbits have a gestation period of 31 to 33 days.)
They are not the first glittering animals created. GFP is commonly used by scientists to visually monitor and monitor gene activity or cellular processes within an organism, often studying diseases. Researchers had previously made fluorescent rodents, monkeys, dogs, cats, and rabbits, but none of these animals were created for commercial purposes. But the Los Angeles project designs glowing bunnies and other animals for sale to consumers. “I think the pet space is huge and highly measured,” Zayner said.
