The micro-pigs have since been used in studies of stem cells and the gut microbiome, Yong Li, technical director of BGI’s animal-science platform, told Nature. The company’s latest pet-selling venture is intended to fund research on gene-editing regulation, Nature reported—and BGI was turning heads at the Shenzhen summit with their pigs. “We had a bigger crowd than anyone,” Lars Bolund, a medical geneticist from Aarhus University in Denmark who helped BGI develop the pig gene-editing program, told Nature. “People were attached to them. Everyone wanted to hold them.”