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Any progress on genetically engineering chicken so that only female chicks are produced, or even better artificially producing eggs without any chickens at all?
by devit 9y ago
Any progress on genetically engineering chicken so that only female chicks are produced, or even better artificially producing eggs without any chickens at all?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_link At least they color female chicks a different color.
- nick238 9y agoPut a fluorescent protein in the W chromosome that's expressed in the embryo, then you could look for the tell-tale color and destroy the others earlier.
- saalweachter 9y agoThis may actually be more difficult for chickens. Chickens use the ZW sex chromosomes, and females are ZW while males are ZZ. This means, among other things, that it is the female germ cell which determines the sex of the offspring, by contributing either a Z or a W. My understanding is that with mammals, you can centrifuge sperm to (more-or-less) separate "X" and "Y" sperm, changing the odds of conception in the direction you choose; even if you found it economical to go this route with chickens, you wouldn't have the option, because all the chicken sperm is "Z".
- bayesian_horse 9y agoYou could inject the hen with a CRISPR vector introducing a mutation into the Z chromosome which would be letal to eggs. Then put a saving gene on the W chromosome. Or a letal mutation on the W chromosome, to select for male broilers. And no, it's not centrifugation. The DNA in the chromosomes is stained, then a cell sorter with a laser determines which ones have more or less chromatin (the Y is missing an arm vs X).