Chicken Sexing - GMO pathway

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GregH
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Posts: 1671
Joined: 17 Feb 2009, 08:20
Location: Brisbane
Location: Chapel Hill, Brisbane Qld

Every year billions of male chicks are "sacrificed" (i.e. smothered under their own weight in drums and/or gassed) at hatcheries so that we can eat eggs - even the organic, free range types. A report on the ABC website claims CSIRO scientists may have come up with an answer - introduce the coding for expression of Fluorescent Jellyfish Protein onto the male sex chromosome. Growing embryos inside the incubated eggs would differentially express FJP on the basis of the embryos sex. Unfortunately the author seems to be unaware that in birds it is the female that carries heterozygous sex chromosomes (WZ) and the male is homozygous (ZZ). It's a great idea to be able to determine the sex of an embryo well before hatching but it will be the females that will be identified and they will be GMO which will upset a portion of the consumer population that don't wish to consume GMO foods or FJP! Another downside of this technology, if adopted, is that the cost of day old chicks for reptile and raptor keepers will go up! If the sex of the chickens could be identified well before hatching the males would never be hatched and killed and discarded eggs could be used as a resource for antibody or vaccine production.
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