A review of transgenic animal techniques and their applications.

Nowadays, breakthroughs in molecular biology are happening at an unprecedented rate. One of them is the ability to engineer transgenic animals. A transgenic animal is one whose genome has been changed to carry genes from another species or to use techniques for animal genome editing for specific traits. Animal features can be changed by purposefully altering the gene (or genes). A mouse was the first successful transgenic animal. Then pigs, sheep, cattle, and rabbits came a few years later. The foreign-interested genes that will be used in animal transgenic techniques are prepared using a variety of methods. The produced gene of interest is placed into a variety of vectors, including yeast artificial chromosomes, bacterial plasmids, and cosmids. Several techniques, including heat shock, electroporation, viruses, the gene gun, microinjection, and liposomes, are used to deliver the created vector, which includes the interesting gene, into the host cell. Transgenesis can be carried out in the gonads, sperm, fertilized eggs, and embryos through DNA microinjection, retroviruses, stem cells, and cloning. The most effective transgenic marker at the moment is fluorescent protein. Although transgenesis raises a number of ethical concerns, this review concentrates on the fundamentals of animal transgenesis and its usage in industry, medicine, and agriculture. Transgenesis success is confirmed by the integration of an antibiotic resistance gene, western and southern blots, PCR, and ELISA. If technology solves social and ethical problems, it will be the most promising in the future.

Candidate genes for productivity identified by genome-wide association study with indicators of class in the Russian meat merino sheep breed.

Genome-wide association studies allow identification of loci and polymorphisms associated with the formation of relevant phenotypes. When conducting a full genome analysis of sheep, particularly promising is the study of individuals with outstanding productivity indicators - exhibition animals, representatives of the super-elite class. The aim of this study was to identify new candidate genes for economically valuable traits based on the search for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with belonging to different evaluation classes in rams of the Russian meat merino breed. Animal genotyping was performed using Ovine Infinium HD BeadChip 600K DNA, association search was performed using PLINK v. 1.07 software. Highly reliable associations were found between animals belonging to different evaluation classes and the frequency of occurrence of individual SNPs on chromosomes 2, 6, 10, 13, and 20. Most of the substitutions with high association reliability are concentrated on chromosome 10 in the region 10: 30859297-31873769. To search for candidate genes, 15 polymorphisms with the highest association reliability were selected (-log10(р) > 9). Determining the location of the analyzed SNPs relative to the latest annotation Oar_rambouillet_v1.0 allowed to identify 11 candidate genes presumably associated with the formation of a complex of phenotypic traits of animals in the exhibition group: RXFP2, ALOX5AP, MEDAG, OPN5, PRDM5, PTPRT, TRNAS-GGA, EEF1A1, FRY, ZBTB21-like, and B3GLCT-like. The listed genes encode proteins involved in the control of the cell cycle and DNA replication, regulation of cell proliferation and apoptosis, lipid and carbohydrate metabolism, the development of the inflammatory process and the work of circadian rhythms. Thus, the candidate genes under consideration can influence the formation of exterior features and productive qualities of sheep. However, further research is needed to confirm the influence of genes and determine the exact mechanisms for implementing this influence on the phenotype.