• Question: Would it be genetically possible to mutate a horse into a unicorn? I actually want to know...

    Asked by maggierider to Lilly on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I love questions like this because you can really talk about what could and could not be possible in science. There a few issues if you wanted to do this but I’ll explore our options…

      Unicorns, unfortunately, are not real. This means we don’t have any DNA from them to help us out. What would have been nice would to have had a copy of unicorn DNA to compare to Horse DNA and look at the differences. If we did, we could either try and mutate a horse’s DNA to be the same as a unicorn’s or even splice together their DNA to make a unicorn/horse hybrid animal (although it wouldn’t be a complete unicorn).

      Another option is to look at what is physically different between a unicorn and a horse: the horn. We could think about trying to get DNA from another real animal with a horn and mutate the horse DNA so it included that. It would be incredibly tricky to pin down which genes actually made the horn as it would probably be lots of different ones and they would have to be switched on/off at the right times. Another problem is that no animal that is closely related to a horse has a horn so we wouldn’t know where to put the bits of DNA if we found them into the horse’s DNA to make it all work.

      Now the next big issue is that I’m pretty sure unicorns are supposed to have magical powers and I have no idea how we could change horse DNA to include that…

      So until we are at a stage where we can create genes from scratch without any template DNA and know what they would do, where in the DNA to put them and how they would be controlled I’m afraid to say that genetically mutating a horse into a unicorn is as much of a fantasy as unicorns themselves 🙁 Let’s just hope evolution does the job for us!

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