Changing the composition and properties of milk

Since the advent of the molecular biology era in the early 1970s, biotechno logy has held great promise for improving animal agriculture. Since 1982, g enetic engineering has held the promise of being able to significantly impr ove animal agriculture, with the dairy industry being one of the first indu stries to see this promise. Since then, the dairy industry has watched as t ransgenic technology has been applied to express foreign proteins in the ma mmary gland for the pharmaceutical industry. However, transgenic technology can also be used to alter the functional and physical properties of milk r esulting in a milk with novel manufacturing properties. Work over the last decade on expression systems and in model species, such as the mouse, has n ow set the stage for the application of transgenic technology directly to t he dairy animal to change the nutritional, antimicrobial and functional pro perties of milk.