Salik Nazki’s Post

CRISPR chickens 🐓 Bird flu is not just a major public health concern—it also inflicts massive economic pain. When avian influenza strikes a turkey or chicken farm, the normal response is to cull the flock. That spikes egg and meat prices and forces the federal government to spend money on investigations and other activities. Last year alone the USDA spent more than $660 million dealing with 59 million infected birds in 47 U.S. states. And the first major outbreak of 2023 was just reported recently. Now researchers at The University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London are trying to genetically modify chickens to make them more resistant to bird flu. Initial results show mixed success: 9 out of 10 genetically edited chickens remained healthy after being exposed to bird flu. But the virus also showed it could infect the birds in more ways than one, suggesting fully protecting poultry could require multiple gene edits. #crispr #birdflu #virology #genetics #bioengineering #geneediting 👏 to the researchers: Alewo Idoko-Akoh, Daniel Goldhill, Carol Sheppard, Dagmara Bialy, Jessica Quantrill, Ksenia Sukhova, Jonathan Brown, Samuel Richardson, Ciara Campbell, Lorna Taylor, Adrian Sherman, Salik Nazki, Jason Long, Michael Skinner, Holly Shelton, Helen Sang, Wendy Barclay & Mike McGrew

NEW: The University of Oxford has once again topped the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as the best university in the world for a record eighth consecutive year. The rankings rate 1,904 universities from 108 countries around the world. ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/e2Uyavg9 #THEUniRankings