CRISPR Cas-9 for treatment and control of Avian viral diseases: challenges and opportunities

SUMMARY

Many viral diseases affect the poultry industry worldwide and pose a devastating economic impact in terms of morbidity and mortality. Generally, there is no treatment for these viral infections, but vaccines are used to control these diseases as prophylaxis. The CRISPR/Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR-associated protein9), a novel and cost-effective gene editing technique, has recently opened new horizons to find new treatments for viral infections by altering the genome of the host or virus. Moreover, this approach can be used to characterise host-virus affinity, elucidate the role of the viral genome, develop recombinant viral vaccines, modify the viral genome to discover antiviral therapies, and disease resistance. The development of several innovative vaccines against viral infections has been made possible by successful CRISPR/Cas9 editing of viral genomes. However, this gene-editing method has some side effects, one of which is off-target mutations. This manuscript summarises the ability of CRISPR/Cas9 to prevent and treat viral diseases in birds using recombinant vaccines and antiviral approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• CRISPR/Cas9
• viruses
• recombinant vaccines
• antiviral
• host

Acknowledgements

All the authors of this manuscript earnestly acknowledged from the support of respective Universities and Institutes.

Disclosure statement

The authors of this manuscript declared that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial of financial relationship that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.