While little kids are simply daydreaming of having a pet unicorn, one startup is actually putting in the legwork to make it a reality.
The Los Angeles Project is using Crispr gene-editing technology to make our pets a little more interesting — we’re talking glow-in-the-dark bunnies, hypoallergenic cats, and, yes, literal unicorns — per Wired.
If glowing pets sound off the rails, it might help to put co-founder Josie Zayner’s resume in context: The biohacker livestreamed injecting herself with Crispr gene-editing tech and has given herself a DIY covid vaccine and a fecal transplant.
The startup, which Zayner told Wired is about making pets “more complex and interesting and beautiful and unique,” has begun work in stealth:
- It’s experimenting with embryos from rabbits, hamsters, fish, and frogs, using Crispr to delete and insert genes.
- It’s testing restriction enzyme mediated integration (REMI), a technique for introducing new DNA to embryos.
- It added a gene to rabbit embryos to make them produce GFP, a fluorescent protein. If the embryos are successfully transferred into a female rabbit, a litter of glowing bunnies will soon be born.
Once the rabbits get glowing, the team will start on cats that don’t have Fel d1, the protein that causes most cat allergies. Hallelujah.
Tweaking species isn’t new…
… Humans have been selectively breeding animals for thousands of years.
GloFish — fish genetically modified with the GFP protein — are already sold in pet stores across the US.
- Yorktown Technologies, which developed the fish, sold the company for $50m in 2017.
- But some of the fish have escaped from farms in Brazil and are reproducing in creeks in the Atlantic Forest, which could threaten native species.
While Zayner says the startup’s animals would be spayed and neutered to avoid accidental reproduction, playing God undoubtedly raises a whole lot of ethical questions. As does using Crispr tech for somewhat superficial, commercial purposes.
Our big question: Can our hypoallergenic kitten have a unicorn horn?