T. J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy, taxidermied head looks down from the office wall of geneticist Lawrence Schook. Now she has been immortalized in this week’s Nature — not by name, but by the letters of her DNA.
Scientists are salivating. For the past couple of decades they have been slowly teasing information from the pig genome, applying it to breed healthier and meatier pigs, and to try to create more faithful models of human disease. This week’s draft sequence of T. J.’s genome (see page 393), with its detailed annotation — a ‘reference genome’ — will speed progress on both fronts, and perhaps even allow pigs to be engineered to provide organs for transplant into human patients. “Agriculture in particular will benefit fast,” says Alan Archibald of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, UK, one of the paper’s lead authors. “The pig industry has an excellent track record for rapid adoption of new technologies and knowledge.”
T. J., a domestic Duroc pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), was born in Illinois in 2001. The next year, Schook and his colleagues generated a fibroblast cell line from a small piece of skin from her ear and commissioned clones to be created from it, so that they could work on animals all with the same genome. One set of clones was created at the National Swine Resource and Research Center (NSRRC) in Columbia, Missouri, along with genetically engineered pigs with genes added or deleted to mimic human diseases.“Making such pigs has got increasingly easier as knowledge of the genome increases,” says physiologist Randall Prather, a co-director of the NSRRC, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The NIH launched the NSRRC in 2003 to encourage research in pig disease models. Pigs are more expensive to keep than rodents, and they reproduce more slowly. But the similarities between pig and human anatomy and physiology can trump the drawbacks. For example, their eyes are a similar size, with photoreceptors similarly distributed in the retina. So the pig became the first model for retinitis pigmentosa, a cause of blindness. And four years ago, researchers created a pig model of cystic fibrosis that, unlike mouse models, developed symptoms resembling those in humans.
Geneticist and veterinarian Eckhard Wolf at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, has exploited the similarity between the human and pig gastrointestinal system and metabolism — like us, pigs will eat almost anything and then suffer for it — to develop models of diabetes. One pig model carries a mutant transgene that limits the effectiveness of incretin, a hormone required for normal insulin secretion. Mice with the transgene developed unexpectedly severe diabetes, but the pigs have a more subtle pre-diabetic condition that better models the human disease. “This shows the importance of using an animal with a relevant physiology,” says Wolf.
Pig models are now being developed for other common conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and muscular dystrophy. This work will be enriched by the discovery, reported in the genome paper, of 112 gene variants that might be involved in human diseases. Knowledge of the genome is also allowing scientists to try to engineer pigs that could be the source of organs, including heart and liver, for human patients. Pig organs are roughly the right size, and researchers hope to create transgenic pigs carrying genes that deceive the immune system of recipients into not rejecting the transplants.
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9 Comments
Add CommentHello Scientific American. I am the author of the photo of Duroc pigs using in this article. I am annoyed - this is a flagrant abuse of my copyright under the CC 2.0 license because this article is for commercial use. I wish therefore to be paid for its use. I note that the original Nature article used an Agency photo for which they of course paid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSwine flu anyone ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Mr Westby,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour picture is benefiting the greater good, the good of society and of education. The picture you wish to be paid for is promoting an article which may influence a child who will become the next great genetic researcher. Without the attention-grabbing picture (the reason I read this article, mind you) who knows how many readers would have passed off this article as "nothing special"?
I find request for money disrespectful to the scientific community, and to any community. You should be ashamed of yourself for your words and actions against Scientific American and Progress itself.
Yours truly, Sean B. Lawrence
Disrespectful? - it is you who are using my photo without permission (contrary to my CC licence) and for financial gain - or is Scientific American now a non-profit organisation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ZergMinded
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this>The picture you wish to be paid for is promoting an article which may influence a child who will become the next great genetic researcher.
wow, what a reach
is that seriously the best excuse you could come up with?
the picture he wishes to be paid for was used against the terms of the license it's under and you're just being a baby about it
"bawww I should get to do whatever I want because it could potentially help someone somewhere eventually maybe"
I don't know why I'm even taking you seriously considering your Starcraft-inspired name
thanks jklwin ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was just alerted to your objections. Our use of your image does not constitute “commercial use” in the legal sense, because the freely available story does not serve as an advertisement (a commercial) or a means to sell a product or service (as 2 media lawyers have informed me).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn any event, I asked our production team to remove your image in accordance with your implied wishes. The image should come down shortly if it hasn’t already.
I am sorry about the misunderstanding. To avoid future confusion, I suggest that you modify your Flickr preference settings.
Sincerely,
Philip Yam
Managing Editor, Online
OK - well thanks Philip ;-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdoesn't constitute commercial use in the legal sense? - you are using it to help sell Scientific American. Of course US lawyers are very astute as the world knows only too well. (the Strauss-Kahn affair and his $6M settlement have been followed closely here in France!)
I won't alter my CC2.0 licence on Flickr as most people do respect it ...
You’re welcome, Max.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, as the Creative Commons license site states, a use by a commercial entity does not necessarily constitute “commercial use,” and a use by a nonprofit does not automatically constitute “noncommercial use.” At the moment, there are no official definitions, unfortunately.
So for now, like fair use and pornography, commercial/noncommercial use has to be interpreted. Sometimes, it can be clear: if we ran your photo of pigs in a story about, say, the value of our brand of organic bacon, then most people would probably agree that such content is a substantively different kind of content than what is posted here and deem it as commercial use.
I understand that the Creative Commons community is working on better definitions of noncommercial use in its next licensing version (4.0). That (or a case that sets a legal precedent) would be a great help in clarifying intentions and preventing misunderstandings between creator and publisher.