Transgenesis in farm animals-A review

For a number of decades, attempts have been made to successfully produce transgenic animals which have numerous applications in the biotechnology industry with the foremost emphasis on production of monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins of human welfare. Different techniques are adopted in order to produce transgenic farm animals which could be further used as bioreactors. The most common traditional transgenesis technique employed is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) using genetically modified somatic cells or stem cells as nuclear donors. This review article summarizes the merits and demerits of the techniques currently used to produce transgenic livestock with major emphasis on somatic cell nuclear transfer. In the end, a brief discussion is done about the novel methods adopted to produce transgenic animals like Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFN), Transcription Activator-like Effector Nuclease (TALEN) and Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR). It is expected that the new techniques developed would overcome the problems faced with existing traditional transgenesis methods.