The research group led by Liangxue LAI from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Science has done the traceless site-directed on porcineinsulin genes through the precise gene editing techniques. They made porcineinsulin genes encode and produce human insulin. They successfully created the gene editing pig which could absolutely secrete human insulin. The research result has been published on journal of Molecularand Cellular Biology.

According to the data issued by International Diabetes Federation in 2015, there were almost 415 million adults suffered from diabetes around the world. There were 5million people died of diabetes which exceeds the total of people died of malaria, pulmonary tuberculosis and HIV.

As the research group introduced, nowadays, the treatments of diabetes areinjection of insulin and islet transplantation. The porcine insulin has beenadopted generally. What’s more, using porcine islet for heterograft to treatdiabetes has made a good progress recently. However, compared to human insulinprotein, there is a difference of amino acids in porcine insulin. The thirtiethamino acid of human insulin B chain is threonine, while in porcine insulin isalanine. This difference would decrease the hypoglycemic effect of porcineinsulin in human body. And the long-term use of it also easily inducesantibodies.

The researchers combined TALENS, CRISPR technique and single-strand edoligonucleotides to build porcine genome traceless fixed-point editing technique. With this technique, they modified the thirtieth amino acid ofporcine insulin B chain from GCC to ACG and acquired the homozygous lines. At thesame time, they have successfully structured cloned pig which could generate human insulin. Confirmed by the test, the insulin extracted from this kind ofpig was complete human insulin.

Time:2016.3.30

Source:www.stdaily.com