Abstract
Meat products are generally low in omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids, which are beneficial to human health. We describe the generation of cloned pigs that express a humanized Caenorhabditis elegans gene, fat-1, encoding an n-3 fatty acid desaturase. The hfat-1 transgenic pigs produce high levels of n-3 fatty acids from n-6 analogs, and their tissues have a significantly reduced ratio of n-6/n-3 fatty acids (P < 0.001).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Angela van Dyke, Kara A. Teacoach and Sarah R. Dellinger for their technical support, James Turk for morphological evaluations and Alan Spire for providing the echocardiograms. This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant CA79553 and American Cancer Society grant RSG-03-140-01-CNE (J.X.K.); NIH grant U42 RR018877 and R01 RR013438 (RSP); NIH grant R01DK64207 (Y.D.) and an unrestricted gift to the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute from the Robert E. Eberly Program for Transplant Innovation.
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J.X.K. is the inventor of the patent applications WO05077022A2 and WO02072028A2 whose value may be affected by this publication.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Fig. 1
Photograph of three piglet littermates, hfat-1 transgenic piglets #8 (middle) and #9 (right) and non-transgenic piglet #10 (left), at age of 3 weeks. (PDF 135 kb)
Supplementary Table 1
n-6/n-3 ratios in organs and tissues from piglets #2, #4 and #5. (PDF 8 kb)
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Lai, L., Kang, J., Li, R. et al. Generation of cloned transgenic pigs rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Nat Biotechnol 24, 435–436 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1198
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1198
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