Validation of genome edited disease resistant pigs

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Infectious disease is the biggest threat to animal protein food security in the 21st century. As production intensifies the livestock industry becomes more vulnerable to devastating disease outbreaks potentially affecting millions of animals. In this project, we target porcine viral diseases for which no effective vaccination or other mitigating strategy is available. We are using state-of-the-art genome editing technology in pigs to produce various alleles of an important immune modulator (RELA) which we hypothesise could improve the resistance/resilience of such pigs to three specific viruses - ASFV, SIV and PRRSV. This project will enable us to validate if any of these alleles confer improved viral resistance/resilience through disease challenge experiments.