Abstract: The dairy industry, with regulatory approvals of recombinant chymosin and bovine somatotropin (BST), has been at the forefront of food and agricultural biotechnology. Early applications of genetic manipulation in cattle,may favor production of heterologous proteins in milk for pharmaceutical and medical use. Such applications could benefit genetic modification of milk and milk proteins for food use by providing advance knowledge and experience in mammalian protein expression. Other research opportunity areas that could affect prospects for genetic manipulation of dairy cattle include genome mapping, metabolic pathways, growth and development, and cattle/microbe interactions. In this review, we summary the status quo about them and prospects for the genetic manipulation of dairy cattle in consideration of some difficulties of technology and economy and some restrictions of the cattle genital system.

Key words: biotechnology; genetic engineering; transgenic; dairy cattle