雅思课外读物--Transplanting pig&#039;s organs into human?

摘要：今天要跟大家分享的雅思阅读素材题目是“Genome engineering may help make porcine organs suitable for use in people”基因组工程有助于使猪器官适合于人的使用，到底这样的办法行不行呢？请看本文为你揭晓！

The porcine kidney cells Dr Church used for his experiments had 62 PERVs embedded (嵌入，植入)in their genomes. He and his colleagues tested their molecular scissors on several lines of these cells. In the most responsive, they managed to snip out (剪掉)all 62 copies of the integration gene.

Since PERVs rely on this gene to infect human cells as well as porcine ones, deleting it should stop them jumping into human hosts. Sure enough, tests in Petri dishes (皮氏培养皿)showed that the modified pig cells did not infect human cells grown alongside them. And, despite the extensive edits made to their DNA, those pig cells seemed unharmed by the procedure.

The editing would need to be done to sex cells, or their precursors(先导细胞), if actual lines of “clean” pigs were to be bred for use as organ donors. But this is still a striking result. Not only does it demonstrate that it is possible to cleanse(清洗) animal cells of unwanted viral passengers, thus helping remove one of the big barriers to cross-species organ transplants; it also shows the power of a genetic-engineering technique that has existed for only three years. (它不仅展示了我们可以将不需要的病毒过客从动物细胞中清洗出去，从而有助于解决跨物种器官移植的大障碍;还展示了存在仅仅三年的基因工程技术的力量所在。)

Vocabulary

transplant 移植

kidney 肾

species 物种

stopgap 临时替代物

conversely 相反地

fetus 胎儿

immune system 免疫系统

tissue 组织

swap 交换

address 解决(问题)

eliminate 消灭