Transgenic Animals Help to Increase Food Production

Other than plants, another application of LMO in agriculture is on the animals. Transgenic animals help to increase food production and quality in order to improve human lifestyle. As the growth population is increasing, so does the food demand, transgenic animals can produce more food to keep up with the growth in human population in the next 50 years and also the following years. Since the animals are able to grow faster, the food production will increase and the price of the meat will become cheaper. In the past few years, transgenic animals such as cattle, sheep, goat and pigs were made to increase food production and benefit human in various way. According to Margawati (2003), the main focuses of transgenic animal in agricultural applications are breeding, quality and disease resistance.

Over the years, farmers have preferred using selective breeding than traditional breeding as selective breeding produces animals with desired traits while traditional breeding is time-consuming. With the advance of biotechnology, various molecular techniques have enabled animals with desirable traits to be produced in a shorter time with more precision. The first transgenic farm animals was reported in the mid-1980s, where microinjection of DNA was used to transfer the gene into the target (Margawati, 2003; Muller & Brem, 2001). Initially, growth performance is the main focus of transgenic approach towards the farm animals. However, growth is a very complex process which is affected by various factors such as the interaction of hormones, nutritional conditions and environmental factors. According to Muller and Brem (2001), gene constructs which contain the genes of the growth hormone (GH) cascade was used to generate transgenic pigs. As a res...

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