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COLLEGE STATION, Texas: Researchers at Texas A&M University say cell engineering might be a way to prevent bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.
The scientists say they've successfully "knocked down" the expression of possible disease-causing genes in a cloned goat fetus, perhaps paving the way for breeding disease resistance in other animals.
Researchers Mark Westhusin and Charles Long in Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, along with colleagues, successfully utilized genetic engineering to produce a goat cell line in which the gene encoding for prion protein, or PrP, was targeted for silencing by a process known as RNA interference.
They said they then utilized the cells for nuclear transfer to produce a cloned, transgenic goat fetus that exhibited a greater than 90 percent knock down of PrP.
Previous studies involving mice in which the PrP gene was silenced demonstrated the animals to be resistant to prion-mediated diseases such as BSE.
The research appears in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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