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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.
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
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
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--
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.