Fig. 1

Pathways to ‘Livestock 2.0’. A brief summary of the developments in livestock breeding and what new technologies might offer to the industry. Selective breeding and genomic selection have already improved productivity and disease resistance in livestock significantly. Genome editing and transgenesis could facilitate step improvements through (i) rapidly increasing the frequency of favorable trait-associated alleles, (ii) introgression of favorable alleles from other breeds/species without linkage drag, and (iii) creation of de novo favorable alleles. A key challenge will be the identification of genome-editing targets, which will require a combination of high-quality annotated livestock genomes, well-powered genome-wide association studies, reverse-genetic screens (e.g. genome-wide CRISPR knock-out), and high-resolution knowledge of the biology of the target traits. CRISPR, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat