Improvement of disease resistance in livestock: Application of immunogenomics and CRISPR/Cas9 technology

Disease occurrence adversely affects livestock production and animal welfare, and have an impact on both human health and public perception of food-animals production. Combined efforts from farmers, animal scientists, and veterinarians have been continuing to explore the effective disease control approaches for the production of safe animal-originated food. Implementing the immunogenomics, along with genome editing technology, has been considering as the key approach for safe food-animal production through the improvement of the host genetic resistance. Next-generation sequencing, as a cutting-edge technique, enables the production of high throughput transcriptomic and genomic profiles resulted from host-pathogen interactions. Immunogenomics combine the transcriptomic and genomic data that links to host resistance to disease, and predict the potential candidate genes and their genomic locations. Genome editing, which involves insertion, deletion, or modification of one or more genes in the DNA sequence, is advancing rapidly and may be poised to become a commercial reality faster than it has thought. The clustered regulatory interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) [CRISPR/Cas9] system has recently emerged as a powerful tool for genome editing in agricultural food production including livestock disease management. CRISPR/Cas9 mediated insertion of NRAMP1 gene for producing tuberculosis resistant cattle, and deletion of CD163 gene for producing porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) resistant pigs are two groundbreaking applications of genome editing in livestock. In this review, we have highlighted the technological advances of livestock immunogenomics and the principles and scopes of application of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated targeted genome editing in animal breeding for disease resistance.