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Fluorescent puppy is world’s first transgenic dog - New Scientist

Ruppy under ultraviolet light - photo by Byeong Chun Lee.

A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world’s first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Ruppy, a clone, carries the fluorescent gene from a sea anemone and comes from the same team who brought us the world’s first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005.

Transgenic simply means that an organism is carrying and expressing some genetic material from another species.  Ruppy is a proof of concept experiment showing that a transgenic dog is possible.  It is thought that dogs can be created with added human genetic material so that they can be used as a model for the understanding and possible treatment of human disease, i.e. experiments can be performed on dogs with some human genes instead of experimenting on humans.

Glowing fish, originally created to fluoresce in the presence of polluted water, are available for purchase under the brand GloFish®.  But don’t expect to buy a GloDog® anytime soon; according to the article, the process of creating pups like Ruppy is tedious and expensive.

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