the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries​

Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.

Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity.

The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants.

The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own.

“Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”

Like many places, Vermont has been hit hard this year by extreme weather linked to climate change. Half a dozen severe storms, including major floods in July, have caused power outages and damaged homes and other buildings.

Those calamities and concerns about the rising cost of electricity helped shape Green Mountain’s proposal, Ms. McClure said. As the company ran the numbers, it realized that paying recovery costs and building more power lines to improve its system would cost a lot more and take a lot longer than equipping homes with batteries.

Green Mountain’s plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers.

The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years — money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines.

The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials.


“We don’t want the power to be off for our customers ever,” Ms. McClure said. “People’s lives are on the line. That is ultimately at the heart of why we’re doing what we’re trying to do.”

Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity.

Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.

Hurricanes, winter storms and wildfires have highlighted the growing vulnerability of electric grids in recent years. To many people they have also reinforced the importance of quickly shifting away from fossil fuels, the primary cause of climate change.

Utilities are spending tens of billions of dollars on strengthening grids and switching to cleaner forms of energy, often with the help of federal and state incentives.

But critics of the industry say utilities are not being particularly innovative in investing in their systems. Utilities are spending a lot on new long-distance power lines that can take years or even decades to build because of environmental reviews and local opposition.

A May report by the Brattle Group, a research firm based in Boston, concluded that utilities could save up to $35 billion a year if they invested in smaller-scale energy projects like home batteries and rooftop solar panels that can be built more easily and quickly.

Green Mountain’s proposal seems to recognize that reality, said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It really is the model, especially if you’re worried about power outages,” she said. “It really could become the example for the rest of the country.”

Ms. McClure said the high cost of large-scale power projects threatened to raise electricity rates so much that many customers might struggle to pay for energy.

Electricity customers in New England pay about $270 a month, on average, for a home that uses 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, compared with the national average of about $160, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s the third-highest rate in the country, behind Hawaii and California. Vermont’s rates are the lowest in New England but still about 29 percent above the national average.

Electricity rates nationwide increased about 25 percent in the last five years and are expected to continue to rise sharply as utilities seek to strengthen the grid and build new renewable energy projects.

Emily Fisher, executive vice president for clean energy and general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade organization, said Green Mountain’s proposal aligns with discussions throughout the industry about ways to respond to climate change and the results of extreme weather.

“I think it’s innovative,” Ms. Fisher said. “I don’t see it as a change in the business model but a way to harness the business model. You’re going to have to show that it has systemwide benefit.”

Power outages cost utilities in the United States about $150 billion a year, according to analysts at Sprott, an investment firm. And modernizing U.S. electric grids could cost “well into the trillions of dollars,” according to Sprott’s estimates.

In addition to the roughly $20 million to $25 million that Green Mountain spends each year on managing trees and other vegetation around its power lines, the utility said, it spent about $55 million on storm recovery this year. It spent an average of less than $10 million a year after storms between 2015 and 2022.

Those kinds of storm recovery costs can increase rates by as much as 7 percent over time because the utility is allowed to recoup that spending from ratepayers.

“If you are leading a utility anywhere in the country you have to get on a path to stop the madness, relative to rates,” Ms. McClure said.
 
They are now showing new video of the criminal ungodly terrorist entering homes and also killing pets as they greeted them. They then advanced into homes and killed all the children as well.

Who in their right minds could support any of these actions.

They must be removed from this world.
All of them.
 
Last edited:
Ah, the Irish...

Yeats and Beckett, Guarding the Irish Coast​

The Irish Navy’s small fleet of warships may be named for celebrated poets and playwrights, but its mission is anything but whimsical, as a record seizure of cocaine from a cargo ship showed.

Ireland is proud of its celebrated writers, particularly W.B. Yeats, the vaunted poet who grew up partly in Sligo, a rugged, rural West Coast county that treasures its enduring role as Yeats Country.

You can stop in at WB’s Coffee House on Stephen Street in Sligo town or the nearby Yeats Society for a poetry reading. You can hike the Yeats Trail and stop by the poet’s modest grave at Drumcliffe Church.
So it was notable one morning last month when The Irish Times reported the biggest drug raid in Irish history had been carried out by — who else? — William Butler Yeats.

Not the poet himself, of course, who died in 1939, but his namesake, a 300-foot-long warship.
It was a reminder that the Irish Navy, to the delight of some and the scorn of others, has been naming ships in its small fleet after Irish writers for nearly a decade.

The renewed attention came on Sept. 26, when a cargo ship from South America carrying more than two tons of cocaine appeared, as the poet once wrote, on “the white breast of the dim sea.”

Warning shots from the Yeats helped stop the cargo ship, allowing Army Rangers to board and pull off a dramatic seizure of drugs worth more than $160 million.

While the authorities hailed the raid as a sign of their coastal patrol prowess, some questioned whether a tiny navy with ships named after Irish poets and writers can adequately stop drug running along the coast. (“Gonna Need Bigger and More Boats,” The Irish Echo said in an editorial.)

It has not helped matters that the navy’s ranks have thinned to the point that it can now support patrols by only two major vessels: the Yeats and the Samuel Beckett, named after the absurdist dramatist who penned “Waiting for Godot.”

The James Joyce and the George Bernard Shaw were recently taken out of action amid personnel shortages that have left the ranks thinner than any point since the 1970s, said Eugene Ryan, a former Irish Navy commander. “The drug dealers know this,” he said.

When he retired in 2012, he said, the navy had 1,200 personnel and eight operational ships. The navy, which patrols Irish waters with help from the country’s Air Corps and other enforcement agencies, reports it now has 755 personnel and two operational ships at any given time, with plans to acquire two more.

Mr. Ryan, who helped lead two large drug seizures off the Irish coast in 2007 and 2008, both with multiple naval vessels, said it was risky to have the Yeats handle the raid without backup.
And as for the ship’s name, he said, “when they began naming vessels after literary people like Yeats and Beckett, we didn’t like it at all.”

He said the navy’s previous practice of using women’s names from mythology and folklore was “a seamen’s tradition that we were proud of.”

Defense officials announced the new approach in 2014 to “facilitate greater recognition” for the navy. When the Irish leader Enda Kenny christened the Samuel Beckett in 2014, he noted the “delicious irony” in naming it for a man who famously abhorred public attention.

The criticism was immediate. The Irish filmmaker and writer Neil Jordan complained that it was inappropriate to associate artists — many of them pacifists — with ships equipped with cannons and heavy machine guns.

The four ships named for writers now make up the bulk of the navy’s large vessels. They are best known for humanitarian deployments, including the response to the European migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea and the coronavirus pandemic, when the Beckett was turned into a mobile testing center.

For many, the names resonate, perhaps because so many Irish writers were inspired by the ocean. Yeats had his “mackerel-crowded seas.” In “Ulysses,” Joyce took a different tack, writing of the “snotgreen sea,” in contrast to the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

Eve Patten, a professor of Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin, said that Shaw, Beckett, Joyce and Yeats “were all voyagers themselves and sailed away from Ireland as soon as they could.”

Beckett was a great sea swimmer whose father threw him into the frigid waters off the Dublin coast as a child, she noted, and “Ulysses” is full of references to sailors and ships.

“But what about the women?” Professor Patten said. “We have plenty of real-life Irish women writers to choose from. Where is the Lady Augusta Gregory, the Edna O’Brien, or the Maeve Binchy? Or perhaps the Sally Rooney?”

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín said he was struck by the image of drug dealers being pursued by a vessel named for the poet who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium.”

“There’s something lovely about the grandeur of Yeats’s name on a ship,” Mr. Tóibín said. “It’s the sort of joke Joyce would have loved, the idea of having a little piece of tin named after him.”

He mused that if the navy vessels took on the personas of their writers or the characteristics of their works, then smugglers should most fear the one named for the quiet minimalist Samuel Beckett. “It would be silent,” he said, “and would be upon you before you knew it was there.”

As for George Bernard Shaw, who wrote plays that could exceed three hours, Mr. Tóibín said, a drug runner might decide “anything but a Shaw play” and simply surrender.
 
Roccus7 said:
Ah, the Irish...

Yeats and Beckett, Guarding the Irish Coast​

The Irish Navy’s small fleet of warships may be named for celebrated poets and playwrights, but its mission is anything but whimsical, as a record seizure of cocaine from a cargo ship showed.

Ireland is proud of its celebrated writers, particularly W.B. Yeats, the vaunted poet who grew up partly in Sligo, a rugged, rural West Coast county that treasures its enduring role as Yeats Country.

You can stop in at WB’s Coffee House on Stephen Street in Sligo town or the nearby Yeats Society for a poetry reading. You can hike the Yeats Trail and stop by the poet’s modest grave at Drumcliffe Church.
So it was notable one morning last month when The Irish Times reported the biggest drug raid in Irish history had been carried out by — who else? — William Butler Yeats.

Not the poet himself, of course, who died in 1939, but his namesake, a 300-foot-long warship.
It was a reminder that the Irish Navy, to the delight of some and the scorn of others, has been naming ships in its small fleet after Irish writers for nearly a decade.

The renewed attention came on Sept. 26, when a cargo ship from South America carrying more than two tons of cocaine appeared, as the poet once wrote, on “the white breast of the dim sea.”

Warning shots from the Yeats helped stop the cargo ship, allowing Army Rangers to board and pull off a dramatic seizure of drugs worth more than $160 million.

While the authorities hailed the raid as a sign of their coastal patrol prowess, some questioned whether a tiny navy with ships named after Irish poets and writers can adequately stop drug running along the coast. (“Gonna Need Bigger and More Boats,” The Irish Echo said in an editorial.)

It has not helped matters that the navy’s ranks have thinned to the point that it can now support patrols by only two major vessels: the Yeats and the Samuel Beckett, named after the absurdist dramatist who penned “Waiting for Godot.”

The James Joyce and the George Bernard Shaw were recently taken out of action amid personnel shortages that have left the ranks thinner than any point since the 1970s, said Eugene Ryan, a former Irish Navy commander. “The drug dealers know this,” he said.

When he retired in 2012, he said, the navy had 1,200 personnel and eight operational ships. The navy, which patrols Irish waters with help from the country’s Air Corps and other enforcement agencies, reports it now has 755 personnel and two operational ships at any given time, with plans to acquire two more.

Mr. Ryan, who helped lead two large drug seizures off the Irish coast in 2007 and 2008, both with multiple naval vessels, said it was risky to have the Yeats handle the raid without backup.
And as for the ship’s name, he said, “when they began naming vessels after literary people like Yeats and Beckett, we didn’t like it at all.”

He said the navy’s previous practice of using women’s names from mythology and folklore was “a seamen’s tradition that we were proud of.”

Defense officials announced the new approach in 2014 to “facilitate greater recognition” for the navy. When the Irish leader Enda Kenny christened the Samuel Beckett in 2014, he noted the “delicious irony” in naming it for a man who famously abhorred public attention.

The criticism was immediate. The Irish filmmaker and writer Neil Jordan complained that it was inappropriate to associate artists — many of them pacifists — with ships equipped with cannons and heavy machine guns.

The four ships named for writers now make up the bulk of the navy’s large vessels. They are best known for humanitarian deployments, including the response to the European migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea and the coronavirus pandemic, when the Beckett was turned into a mobile testing center.

For many, the names resonate, perhaps because so many Irish writers were inspired by the ocean. Yeats had his “mackerel-crowded seas.” In “Ulysses,” Joyce took a different tack, writing of the “snotgreen sea,” in contrast to the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

Eve Patten, a professor of Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin, said that Shaw, Beckett, Joyce and Yeats “were all voyagers themselves and sailed away from Ireland as soon as they could.”

Beckett was a great sea swimmer whose father threw him into the frigid waters off the Dublin coast as a child, she noted, and “Ulysses” is full of references to sailors and ships.

“But what about the women?” Professor Patten said. “We have plenty of real-life Irish women writers to choose from. Where is the Lady Augusta Gregory, the Edna O’Brien, or the Maeve Binchy? Or perhaps the Sally Rooney?”

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín said he was struck by the image of drug dealers being pursued by a vessel named for the poet who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium.”

“There’s something lovely about the grandeur of Yeats’s name on a ship,” Mr. Tóibín said. “It’s the sort of joke Joyce would have loved, the idea of having a little piece of tin named after him.”

He mused that if the navy vessels took on the personas of their writers or the characteristics of their works, then smugglers should most fear the one named for the quiet minimalist Samuel Beckett. “It would be silent,” he said, “and would be upon you before you knew it was there.”

As for George Bernard Shaw, who wrote plays that could exceed three hours, Mr. Tóibín said, a drug runner might decide “anything but a Shaw play” and simply surrender.
Click to expand...
Fantastic, I love it. Thank you for sharing this.
 
The reason to dig more when you see this from mainstream media. Explain how you do not use that word after reading the excerpt.

www.foxnews.com

CBC leaked emails tell reporters to not use 'terrorist' in Hamas coverage: 'This is opinion, not fact'

Leaked emails from a CBC official instructed reporters to not use the term "terrorist" in their Middle East coverage, calling the term "politicized" and "opinion."
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

BREAKING NEWS2 hour(s) ago
PINNED

Israel soldiers said to discover unspeakable horrors in community attacked by Hamas​


Israeli soldiers shared details of unimaginable atrocities committed in a community where dozens of victims, including about 40 babies, were massacred by Hamas terrorists.
 
longcast said:
The reason to dig more when you see this from mainstream media. Explain how you do not use that word after reading the excerpt.

www.foxnews.com

CBC leaked emails tell reporters to not use 'terrorist' in Hamas coverage: 'This is opinion, not fact'

Leaked emails from a CBC official instructed reporters to not use the term "terrorist" in their Middle East coverage, calling the term "politicized" and "opinion."
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

BREAKING NEWS2 hour(s) ago
PINNED

Israel soldiers said to discover unspeakable horrors in community attacked by Hamas​


Israeli soldiers shared details of unimaginable atrocities committed in a community where dozens of victims, including about 40 babies, were massacred by Hamas terrorists.
Click to expand...

 
Very interesting. Many folks believe that CRISPR technology will lead the charge in gene editing, and it will, BUT when you edit genes to provide protection against diseases driven by things that like to evolve, you have exactly what Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) predicted:
life-uh.gif


Scientists Use CRISPR to Make Chickens More Resistant to Bird Flu​

A new study highlights both the promise and the limitations of gene editing, as a highly lethal form of avian influenza continues to spread around the world.

Scientists have used the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR to create chickens that have some resistance to avian influenza, according to a new study that was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

The study suggests that genetic engineering could potentially be one tool for reducing the toll of bird flu, a group of viruses that pose grave dangers to both animals and humans. But the study also highlights the limitations and potential risks of the approach, scientists said.

Some breakthrough infections still occurred, especially when gene-edited chickens were exposed to very high doses of the virus, the researchers found. And when the scientists edited just one chicken gene, the virus quickly adapted. The findings suggest that creating flu-resistant chickens will require editing multiple genes and that scientists will need to proceed carefully to avoid driving further evolution of the virus, the study’s authors said.

The research is “proof of concept that we can move toward making chickens resistant to the virus,” Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London and an author of the study, said at a news briefing. “But we’re not there yet.”

Some scientists who were not involved in the research had a different takeaway.

“It’s an excellent study,” said Dr. Carol Cardona, an expert on bird flu and avian health at the University of Minnesota. But to Dr. Cardona, the results illustrate how difficult it will be to engineer a chicken that can stay a step ahead of the flu, a virus known for its ability to evolve swiftly.

“There’s no such thing as an easy button for influenza,” Dr. Cardona said. “It replicates quickly, and it adapts quickly.”

Avian influenza refers to a group of flu viruses that are adapted to spread in birds. Over the last several years, a highly lethal version of a bird flu virus known as H5N1 has spread rapidly around the globe, killing countless farmed and wild birds. It has also repeatedly infected wild mammals and been detected in a small number of people. Although the virus remains adapted to birds, scientists worry that it could acquire mutations that help it spread more easily among humans, potentially setting off a pandemic.

Many nations have tried to stamp out the virus by increasing biosecurity on farms, quarantining infected premises and culling infected flocks. But the virus has become so widespread in wild birds that it has proved impossible to contain, and some nations have begun vaccinating poultry, although that endeavor presents some logistic and economic challenges.

If scientists could engineer resistance into chickens, farmers would not need to routinely vaccinate new batches of birds. Gene editing “promises a new way to make permanent changes in the disease resistance of an animal,” Mike McGrew, an embryologist at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute and an author of the new study, said at the briefing. “This can be passed down through all the gene-edited animals, to all the offspring.”

CRISPR, the gene-editing technology used in the study, is a molecular tool that allows scientists to make targeted edits in DNA, changing the genetic code at a precise point in the genome. In the new study, the researchers used this approach to tweak a chicken gene that codes for a protein known as ANP32A, which the flu virus hijacks to copy itself. The tweaks were designed to prevent the virus from binding to the protein — and therefore keep it from replicating inside chickens.

The edits did not appear to have negative health consequences for the chickens, the researchers said. “We observed that they were healthy, and that the gene-edited hens also laid eggs normally,” said Dr. Alewo Idoko-Akoh, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

The researchers then sprayed a dose of flu virus into the nasal cavities of 10 chickens that had not been genetically edited, to serve as the control. (The researchers used a mild version of the virus different from the one that has been causing major outbreaks in recent years.) All of the control chickens were infected with the virus, which they then transmitted to other control chickens they were housed with.
When the researchers administered flu virus directly into the nasal cavities of 10 gene-edited chickens, just one of the birds became infected. It had low levels of the virus and did not pass the virus on to other gene-edited birds.

“But having seen that, we felt that it would be the responsible thing to be more rigorous, to stress test this and ask, ‘Are these chickens truly resistant?’” Dr. Barclay said. “‘What if they were to somehow encounter a much, much higher dose?’”

When the scientists gave the gene-edited chickens a flu dose that was 1,000 times higher, half of the birds became infected. The researchers found, however, that they generally shed lower levels of the virus than control chickens exposed to the same high dose.

The researchers then studied samples of the virus from the gene-edited birds that had been infected. These samples had several notable mutations, which appeared to allow the virus to use the edited ANP32A protein to replicate, they found.

Some of these mutations also helped the virus replicate better in human cells, although the researchers noted that those mutations in isolation would not be enough to create a virus that was well adapted to humans.

Seeing those mutations is “not ideal,” said Richard Webby, who is a bird flu expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and was not involved in the research. “But when you get to the weeds of these particular changes, then it doesn’t concern me quite so much.”

The mutated flu virus was also able to replicate even in the complete absence of the ANP32A protein by using two other proteins in the same family, the researchers found. When they created chicken cells that lacked all three of these proteins, the virus was not able to replicate. Those chicken cells were also resistant to the highly lethal version of H5N1 that has been spreading around the world the last several years.

The researchers are now working to create chickens with edits in all three of the genes for the protein family.

The big question, Dr. Webby said, was whether chickens with edits in all three genes would still develop normally and grow as fast as poultry producers needed. But the idea of gene editing chickens had enormous promise, he said. “Absolutely, we’re going to get to a point where we can manipulate the host genome to make them less susceptible to flu,” he said. “That’ll be a win for public health.”
 
Roccus7 said:
Very interesting. Many folks believe that CRISPR technology will lead the charge in gene editing, and it will, BUT when you edit genes to provide protection against diseases driven by things that like to evolve, you have exactly what Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) predicted:
life-uh.gif


Scientists Use CRISPR to Make Chickens More Resistant to Bird Flu​

A new study highlights both the promise and the limitations of gene editing, as a highly lethal form of avian influenza continues to spread around the world.

Scientists have used the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR to create chickens that have some resistance to avian influenza, according to a new study that was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

The study suggests that genetic engineering could potentially be one tool for reducing the toll of bird flu, a group of viruses that pose grave dangers to both animals and humans. But the study also highlights the limitations and potential risks of the approach, scientists said.

Some breakthrough infections still occurred, especially when gene-edited chickens were exposed to very high doses of the virus, the researchers found. And when the scientists edited just one chicken gene, the virus quickly adapted. The findings suggest that creating flu-resistant chickens will require editing multiple genes and that scientists will need to proceed carefully to avoid driving further evolution of the virus, the study’s authors said.

The research is “proof of concept that we can move toward making chickens resistant to the virus,” Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London and an author of the study, said at a news briefing. “But we’re not there yet.”

Some scientists who were not involved in the research had a different takeaway.

“It’s an excellent study,” said Dr. Carol Cardona, an expert on bird flu and avian health at the University of Minnesota. But to Dr. Cardona, the results illustrate how difficult it will be to engineer a chicken that can stay a step ahead of the flu, a virus known for its ability to evolve swiftly.

“There’s no such thing as an easy button for influenza,” Dr. Cardona said. “It replicates quickly, and it adapts quickly.”

Avian influenza refers to a group of flu viruses that are adapted to spread in birds. Over the last several years, a highly lethal version of a bird flu virus known as H5N1 has spread rapidly around the globe, killing countless farmed and wild birds. It has also repeatedly infected wild mammals and been detected in a small number of people. Although the virus remains adapted to birds, scientists worry that it could acquire mutations that help it spread more easily among humans, potentially setting off a pandemic.

Many nations have tried to stamp out the virus by increasing biosecurity on farms, quarantining infected premises and culling infected flocks. But the virus has become so widespread in wild birds that it has proved impossible to contain, and some nations have begun vaccinating poultry, although that endeavor presents some logistic and economic challenges.

If scientists could engineer resistance into chickens, farmers would not need to routinely vaccinate new batches of birds. Gene editing “promises a new way to make permanent changes in the disease resistance of an animal,” Mike McGrew, an embryologist at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute and an author of the new study, said at the briefing. “This can be passed down through all the gene-edited animals, to all the offspring.”

CRISPR, the gene-editing technology used in the study, is a molecular tool that allows scientists to make targeted edits in DNA, changing the genetic code at a precise point in the genome. In the new study, the researchers used this approach to tweak a chicken gene that codes for a protein known as ANP32A, which the flu virus hijacks to copy itself. The tweaks were designed to prevent the virus from binding to the protein — and therefore keep it from replicating inside chickens.

The edits did not appear to have negative health consequences for the chickens, the researchers said. “We observed that they were healthy, and that the gene-edited hens also laid eggs normally,” said Dr. Alewo Idoko-Akoh, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

The researchers then sprayed a dose of flu virus into the nasal cavities of 10 chickens that had not been genetically edited, to serve as the control. (The researchers used a mild version of the virus different from the one that has been causing major outbreaks in recent years.) All of the control chickens were infected with the virus, which they then transmitted to other control chickens they were housed with.
When the researchers administered flu virus directly into the nasal cavities of 10 gene-edited chickens, just one of the birds became infected. It had low levels of the virus and did not pass the virus on to other gene-edited birds.

“But having seen that, we felt that it would be the responsible thing to be more rigorous, to stress test this and ask, ‘Are these chickens truly resistant?’” Dr. Barclay said. “‘What if they were to somehow encounter a much, much higher dose?’”

When the scientists gave the gene-edited chickens a flu dose that was 1,000 times higher, half of the birds became infected. The researchers found, however, that they generally shed lower levels of the virus than control chickens exposed to the same high dose.

The researchers then studied samples of the virus from the gene-edited birds that had been infected. These samples had several notable mutations, which appeared to allow the virus to use the edited ANP32A protein to replicate, they found.

Some of these mutations also helped the virus replicate better in human cells, although the researchers noted that those mutations in isolation would not be enough to create a virus that was well adapted to humans.

Seeing those mutations is “not ideal,” said Richard Webby, who is a bird flu expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and was not involved in the research. “But when you get to the weeds of these particular changes, then it doesn’t concern me quite so much.”

The mutated flu virus was also able to replicate even in the complete absence of the ANP32A protein by using two other proteins in the same family, the researchers found. When they created chicken cells that lacked all three of these proteins, the virus was not able to replicate. Those chicken cells were also resistant to the highly lethal version of H5N1 that has been spreading around the world the last several years.

The researchers are now working to create chickens with edits in all three of the genes for the protein family.

The big question, Dr. Webby said, was whether chickens with edits in all three genes would still develop normally and grow as fast as poultry producers needed. But the idea of gene editing chickens had enormous promise, he said. “Absolutely, we’re going to get to a point where we can manipulate the host genome to make them less susceptible to flu,” he said. “That’ll be a win for public health.”
Click to expand...
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