With one gene, molecular geneticist Steve Kemp may someday be able to boost the success of small farms across a huge swath of central Africa.
The gene is from a baboon, and it’s important because it produces a protein that kills a diabolical protozoan called Trypanosoma brucei. Trypanosoma brucei causes a deadly wasting disease–trypanomiasis–in both cattle and humans. Now stick with me, here’s where it gets interesting:
That protozoan, called a trypanosome, is the reason one-third of the African continent–an area the size of the United States–is almost completely prevented from keeping livestock. That’s because the tse-tse fly, the trypanosome’s preferred method of transportation, lives there. Where flies can infect cattle, cattle usually can’t survive.
The implications of animal-free farming in the developing world are enormous. For starters, there’s malnutrition. A quarter of the 800 million malnourished people on our planet live in sub-Saharan Africa, and lack of protein is a significant contributing factor.
But the larger problem is labor. In that cattle-free zone, 90 percent of the land is still worked by hand.
Kemp now estimates that they’re about a year away from having a transgenic cow grazing the ILRI pastures.
He doesn’t pretend this effort will solve all livestock problems. “We don’t imagine this is a silver bullet,” he says, “But it does address the single most important pathogen over huge areas of Africa.”
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Genetically-Modified Cattle May Help Reshape African Farms
