The Production of Transgenic Livestock and Its Applications

During the last 20 years, transgenic animal technology has provided revolutionary new opportunities in many aspects of agriculture and biotechnology. Several gene delivery systems including pronuclear injection, retroviral vectors, sperm vectors, and somatic cell cloning have developed for making transgenic animals. In the future major improvements in transgenic animal generation will be mainly covered by somatic cell cloning technology. Many factors affecting integration frequency and expression of the transgenes should be overcome to facilitate the industrial applications of transgenic technology. Transgenic animal technology has settled down in some areas of the biotechnology, especially the mass production of valuable human proteins and xenotransplantation. In the 21st century animal biotechnology will further contribute to welfare of human being.