-
- "The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees." - Erwin Schrodinger
-
- visit starnesmusic.com
- Lijit Search
Pages
Archives
- March 2010 (2)
- February 2010 (2)
- December 2009 (3)
- October 2009 (2)
- September 2009 (16)
- August 2009 (4)
- July 2009 (2)
- June 2009 (37)
- May 2009 (51)
- April 2009 (52)
- March 2009 (58)
- February 2009 (18)
Ruppy The Fluorescent Transgenic Puppy
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.
If you liked this story, please sign-up here for email updates whenever I add new content to The Starnes!
Similar Posts: