Scenario
Patients with organ failure or severe diseases may need organ transplants. However, there is often a long waitlist for certain organs, and patients may not be able to acquire a human organ transplant in time. To address this issue, pigs have been studied as a potential source of organs to use for transplants because pig organs are similar in size to human organs and are easy to obtain. However, a major health concern that needs to be addressed before pig organ transplantation becomes viable is the prevention of bacterial or viral transmission from pig organs to the human patient.
One pig virus that is particularly difficult to prevent from being transmitted is porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV). At some point in time, PERV infected pig eggs or sperm and thus incorporated its own genome into the pig genome, and all species of pigs carry the PERV genome to some extent. Therefore, if a pig kidney is used for a human transplant, all of the pig kidney cells will have the DNA for PERV, and these could possibly infect the human host.
To prevent transmission of PERV, researchers have recently used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to introduce mutations in the pol gene. The pol gene codes for the enzyme reverse transcriptase that functions to produce PERV from the pig genome, thus preventing PERV from being produced. As of late 2017, 37 CRISPR-edited piglets were born and 15 were still alive. However, their organs have yet to be transplanted into humans.
-Suppose that the researchers targeted the DNA polymerase gene instead of the pol gene. What do you think the most likely outcome would have been?
A)They would have achieved the same outcome as described in this experiment.
B)All of the piglets would have likely been born and lived healthy lives since DNA polymerase is important for cell division.
C)It is likely that the technique would not have worked at all since cells would not be able to replicate their DNA without DNA polymerase.
D)They would not have been able to do the experiment since pig cells do not have the DNA polymerase gene.

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