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Glowing Fish are First Genetically Engineered Pets
securitas writes "It was bound to happen. Texas-based biotechnology company Yorktown Technologies will start selling a 'genetically engineered aquarium fish that glows in the dark.' The trademarked GloFish -- 'a tropical zebra fish infused with the gene of a sea anemone that makes it glow fluorescent red' -- is first genetically engineered pet. The possible consequences of introducing a new trangenic species into the environment has touched off a debate that has critics such as the National Academies of Science and the Center for Food Safety calling for a ban on the sale of the fish unless the FDA regulates and approves it. The fish go on sale in January 2004. You can see photos of the GloFish here. Cool, but it's no Blinky." M : I think these guys are marketing the fish for a Taiwanese company.
The fish are sterilized. No Problems here...
This is old news. These may be other glowing fish, as they are from Taiwan, but you can get the details
Here or here
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
On the other hand, they look pretty cool. More photos here.
I think I'll add them to my Christmas wish list. :-)
And to go with these red-glowing GloFish, maybe I'll add some of these green-glowing Night Perls from Taiwan:
news story picture.
My girlfriend is a molecular biologist who worked for a time in a lab where they made glowing animals like this ( mostly worms, but they had some rats also ). The reason, scientifically, for making these creatures is not just for the sake of seeing if you can make them glow. Rather, if you attach the genes for the glowing proteins adjacent to the genes for some other protein you'd like to monitor in the animal's DNA, then the glowing protein will become attached to the target protein, and you can get a snapshot of how active that protein is in the organism by simply turning on a UV light. This is a very useful tool for seeing how a particular gene is expressed in the active biology of the organism, because you can watch where, when and how the proteins which that gene codes for are expressed, and in what cells. The glowing pets is just some creepy Frankensteinian commercial spin-off of this research tool.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Did you mean Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)?
Furthermore, Mendel worked primarily with traits of pea plants, which clearly could intermingle in nature. The same is true with dogs - I think if you look around you will find they are not terribly particular about who, when, or where they, ur, cross-breed with.
I think that the questions most people have about altering DNA stem (pun intended) from the fact that humans are creating results that could never occur in nature.
Have you seen my stapler?
You make a good point but I believe the title refers to the fact that this is a "transgenic" engineering. That is a different ballpark that cross-breeding.
From m-w.com:
transgenic - Having chromosomes into which one or more heterologous genes have been incorporated either artificially or naturally
heterologous - derived from a different species
The article says: "a tropical zebra fish infused with the gene of a sea anemone that makes it glow fluorescent red." Im no fish expert but i dont think you can breed fish with sea anemones.
For your analogy to work, you would have to say something like english bulldogs received genes from a silk spider and now has silky smooth dog turds and can walk up walls.
Yep. Grandparent is a troll, but his question is common enough that it's worth answering.
Genetic engineering is hard work. Just as mechanical engineers build prototypes to test their ideas before going into full-scale production, so do genetic engineers (and, actually, every other type of engineer I can think of.) As I mentioned in another post, we breed glowing mice at my work; it took about five years of basic research and another three years of trial and error to get a strain of true-breeding* GFP** mice.
Are these mice useful for anything in themselves? Well, actually, they are; it turns out the GFP gene is a useful marker for other genes that don't express quite so dramatically. But that really wasn't the point. The point was to learn how to implant certain genes -- say, genes that are a risk factor for certain kinds of cancer, or genes for resistance to AIDS, or genes to produce useful drugs -- in a true-breeding strain of mice. Now that technology is understood, and it can usefully be applied to all the examples I gave and many more.
No one gets upset when Ford builds a concept car, for God's sake.
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* True-breeding means that the children of parents with these characteristics will reliably have the characteristics themselves.
** Green Fluorescent Protein. IIRC, originally found in jellyfish.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
These "GloFish" DO NOT glow in the dark. They fluoresce red under a black light (UV radiation, for those of us who care). But from everything I've read, they don't emit any light at all in the absence of external UV. None. So, that pretty much makes them "Glow-in-the-LIGHT fish."
Now, I'm not entirely suprised that the NYTimes doesn't understand that difference, but slashdotters should be able to.
--Use this space for notes--
can someone please tell me what the FDA has to do with it? It's just more anti-GM paranoia.
The antis are worried about what might happen when these fish are released into the wild, as inevitably happens to a fair proportion of any pet species. You may not be going to eat the things, but predators are. And you might end up eating one of the predators. Hence the FDA connection.
It's paranoia, perhaps, but it's a question that's worth asking nonetheless. If the sellers can convince the authorities that the fish are safe, then the paranoid are left without a leg to stand on. Why don't you want this to happen? I don't for a moment believe that you're secretly worried that they'll turn out not to be safe, so what is your reason for not wanting anyone to certify that they are?
And it's probably a good thing for the people who created them that they are. Danios (these fish are more correctly referred to as "zebra danios") are incredibly easy to breed, and if they weren't sterile, you'd see them at Wal-Mart for twenty-seven cents plus tax soon. However, I've never seen this sort of thing before - fish are all pretty "open source" and breeders are pretty much allowed to do as they please with them. I can't help but thinking that excessive use of forced copyright (via sterilization), like this, could easily put fish breeders out of business.
Much better for the individual fish.
From glofish.com:
Where do fluorescent zebra fish come from?
Fluorescent zebra fish were specially bred to help detect environmental pollutants. By adding a natural fluorescence gene to the fish, scientists are able to quickly and easily determine when our waterways are contaminated. The first step in developing these pollution detecting fish was to create fish that would be fluorescent all the time. It was only recently that scientists realized the public's interest in sharing the benefits of this research. We call this the GloFish (TM) fluorescent fish.
Actually I'm pretty sure these "Zebra Fish" are actually Zebra Danios, at least they appear to be zebra danios..
:)
I have 3 zebra danios, and considering how little I actually clean my aquarium, they are extremely resilient little fish. I'm talking on-par with goldfish as far as hardiness. There is also a long-fin variety of danios that are quite pretty, I'd like to see some glow in the dark long finned ones.
Anyway, my point is, any idiot that can keep half-way decent water in a tank, should be able to keep these little guys happy
Klowner
Uhm, it wasn't a company in Texas that made the breakthrough, it was a company in Taiwan, and they did it 5 months ago. I recall reading an article about it on the BBC.
Beware blue cats moving at
Well, just to play Devil's Advocate:
Here in SW Florida, we have a big problem with Australian Paper trees. They look like a Birch sorta with this peeling thin paper like bark. While they are a hayfever hazard, the worse is what they do the environment. They suck all the water out of the water tables.
Even worse, when you chop dow n the trees, they release thier seeds. So you need to poison the trees first, then wait a week to chop them down.
There is a big tree problem in SWF, and it is a slow expensive process to get rid of them. You see, noone realized the problem untill after it was well established.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Trans-species gene proliferation does happen in nature but is rather rare. A trans-species virus can carry an existing gene from one species, infect another species, and end up leaving the gene in the second species. If the gene is implanted in zygotes, then it will be transmitted onto offspring. This is effectively what we do in the lab for genetiv engineering.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life