World's First DNA Engineered Monkeys Crispr/Cas9 Born in Lab

Say hello to Crispr/Cas9--the world' first genetically modified monkeys birthed in a lab through the complexities of DNA engineering.

According to researchers at Nanjing Medical University and Yunnan Key laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in Kunming, China, they created two genetically modified macaques with targeted mutations through the CRISPR/Cas9 system.

Though scientists have previously worked with new genome-editing techniques to insert, delete and modify certain DNA sequences in human cells, this method was able to create gene modifications in such animals as mice, zebrafish and rats. Now, scientists can use Crispr to create viable primates with modified genomes at targeted genes.

"Our study show that the CRISPR/Cas9 system enables simultaneous disruption of two target genes in one step without producing off-target mutations," said study author Jiahao Sha, via Science Daily. "Considering that many human diseases are caused by genetic abnormalities, targeted genetic modification in monkeys is invaluable for the generation of human disease models."

To create these monkeys was a particularly daunting process. According to the study, researchers targeted genes in 180 single-cell monkey embryos and injected 83 of the embryos into female macaques. Of those, only 10 pregnancies resulted, and from there, only one pregnancy has so far resulted in a birth pair with simultaneous mutations in two genes.

So far, researchers have found multiple changes via their target genes through different embryonic development stages. However, they note that at this time, the macaques are still to young to determine if the experiment had any physiology or behavioral effects on them.

As monkeys are often a choice by scientists to examine human disorders due to their similarities with Homo Sapiens, some researchers are already hopeful of the potential to recreate such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in these animals to be further studied.

"People have been looking for primate models for a whole list of diseases, but in the past it's been either completely unfeasible, or incredibly expensive," said Nelson Freimer, director of the centre of neurobehavioral genetics at the University of California, via The Guardian. "It's going to be really crticial to define the problems for which this is used, just as you always do with animal research. You want to use all the alternatives before you propose animal research. This will be reserved for terrible diseases for which it offers hopes that cannot be gotten any other way." 

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More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Cell.