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Dec 28, 2017

Faster, stronger, better jumpers: Genetically engineered ‘super-horses’ to be born in 2019

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics

Scientists, who had previously cloned polo ponies, have achieved yet another breakthrough in their work that could lead to the creation of genetically engineered “super-horses” that are faster, stronger and better jumpers than regular horses within two years.

Scientists in Argentina reportedly managed to rewrite the genomes of cloned horses by using a powerful DNA editing technique called CRISPR. They also produced healthy embryos that are now expected to be implanted into a surrogate mother by 2019.

CRISPR, an acronym that stands for Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeats, is basically a technique in a bacteria’s immune system. When a virus invades a bacterial cell, the CRISPR system captures a piece of the virus’s DNA and slides it into a section of the bacteria’s own DNA, allowing it to detect and destroy the virus as well as similar viruses in future attacks.

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