Forget about cats and dogs. China wants you to meet your future best friend: the mini pigs. That’s right! For only US $1600 (or 10000 yuan), you can get yourself an adorable little pig that won’t ever get big.
BGI, a famous Shenzen-based genomics institute announced its desire to genetically engineer a pig that’s as big as a medium-sized dog (weighing 30 pounds or 15 kilograms when mature).
Source: Huffington Post
As its research progresses, BGI can offer its customers different coat colors and patterns through gene editing. Gene editing can lead to curing genetic diseases and genetically modifying traits of people, plants and animals.
Given the small size of these mini pigs, they would be easier to study for the researchers inside the laboratory. One example of the research done on these pigs is the study of Laron syndrome, a case of dwarfism affected by the mutation of the growth hormone receptor gene.
Source: CCTV News
In order to create these adorable mini pigs, BGI created cloned pigs from cells extracted from a Bama fetus and took out one or two copies of its growth hormone receptor gene. It disables the pig to grow further and just stay as a micro version of the pigs commonly seen today.
To produce more of these mini pigs, breeding of the cloned male pigs and normal female pigs occurred. This breeding would normally produce some normal pigs while the others turn out to be mini pigs. No harmful effects were observed on any of the pigs. However, one should not be complacent about the initial results since cloned animals tend to have health problems in the long run.
Other researches have been made to genetically modify dogs, cats and other animals. However, concerns about its exposures to the ecosystem were taken into account. If the effect of having mini pigs meant regulations being created to control the exposure of the mini pigs to the public. Money raised from selling mini pigs will be used to further their research on gene editing.
So, if you have an extra $1,600 in your pocket, you can have these adorable little pigs as pets. You may not look at bacons the same way ever again.
