328 Awardee Talk: The importance of genetic improvement to the sustainability of animal agriculture

Abstract

Abstract It is hard to overstate the important impact that food animal breeding programs have had on decreasing the environmental footprint of animal protein production. Genetic improvement, combined with improved nutritional and animal health programs, have resulted in a significant decrease in the current environmental footprint per unit of animal protein production, as compared to 50 years ago. Accelerated rates of genetic change have been enabled by the adoption of technologies such as artificial insemination and genomic selection. To address projected future animal protein demands using less inputs, animal breeders will need to continue to introduce new breeding methods into food animal breeding programs to further improve the rate of genetic change. Genome editing represents one such technique, offering an approach to precisely knock out undesirable traits, and rapidly introgress useful genetic variants in the absence of linkage drag. Although there is great potential for this technology, it comes following a fractious 30-year debate regarding the use of genetic engineering in food production systems. Additionally, FDA’s proposed regulatory approach to treat all “intentional genome alterations” introduced by genome-editing as new animal drugs, makes it unlikely public sector food animal researchers will be able to afford even basic research and development using genome editing reagents. There is a pressing need for animal geneticists to speak out about the opportunity costs of forestalling safe innovation in animal breeding programs. However, this mandate comes at a time when consumers are questioning the need, or desirability, of applying modern molecular technologies to agricultural production systems. This poses a vexing problem to animal geneticists – is the customer always right?, or are there compelling global food security and environmental reasons to advocate for the use of modern molecular techniques to enable the next inflection point in the rate of genetic improvement in food animal breeding programs.