Producció de organismos genéticamente manipulados: Desarrollo de las técnicas de clonación para la obtención de animales transgénicos productores de proteínas de interés económico

This project is a follow up of projects GAN241/89, AGF93-0560, AGF96/1093-CO2 y AGF99-1232-CO2, which objectives were the development of the in vitro maturation and fertilization techniques, embryo manipulation and cloning of milk protein genes in goats. This goals have been mostly achieved. From the results obtained, and considering the new strategies recently developed for the production of transgenic animals through nuclear transfer, two main goals are proposed for the present project: 1)To the the capacity of the caprine B-lactoglobulin (BLG) expression cassette, designed by our group, to direct the efficient expression of an exogenous protein (human FSH) to the mammary gland of transgenic animals; 2) To develop in our laboratory the nuclear transfer techiques for its future application in the production of transgenic goats secreting pharmaceutical proteins in their milk. Achievement of such objectives should bring forward several potential benefits. First, the production of human FSH in the milk of transgenic animals, as an alternative to the present production systems, would eliminate the inherent risks of haemoderivatives manipulation and would increase the available concentration of this protein, thus facilitating its purification. Second, the development of the new techniques for the production of transgenic animals through nuclear transfer would represent an alternative system to DNA pronuclear microinjection, much more efficient. This would allow a reduction in the number of embryos to manipulate and in the time necessary to obtain the transgenic animals, two factors of outmost importance when dealing with farm animals.