Researchers at the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center have found that it may be possible to develop poultry that are resistant to disease. Over the past four years, researchers Steven Stice and Franklin West, at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environment Sciences and Claudio Afonso at the USDA’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory have used single strands of RNA that fold back on themselves in order to selectively stop the production of nucleic acids that cause disease in poultry.
The process for enhancing disease resistance is potentially a superior disease protection that any vaccination, the researchers said. This is because it introduces permanent genetic resistance that is transmittable to a bird’s offspring.
“Preventing these lethal viruses from replicating in individual chickens may reduce the overall level of virus transmission from one chicken to the next,” Slice, director of the Regenerative Bioscience Center said. This technology could be applied to avian influenza and swine flu, among other diseases. “We have taken many years to prove that this technology is viable, and we are now ready to expand our work to the next stage, Stice said.
