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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.
You have seen the Fluorescent bunny haven't you? Its fluorescence doesn't come from eating a fluorescent fish, though. It was genetically modified to expressed GFP.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
This sounds a lot like what happened here at the Univeristy of Hawaii. They cloned mice and threw in a little jellyfish in the process to make the mice flourescent. "Four of the mice are fluorescent; they glow green under black light. The glow comes from modified gene protein from jellyfish, which "is a quick demonstration that they are transgenic," said researcher Istefo Moisyadi."
. ht ml
http://starbulletin.com/2001/02/06/news/story11
Look here (and following cartoons :))
..if the genetical information of these fish are altered to produce this glowing behaviour, what happens when they breed with "normal" fish or even fish from a different species (as it happens sometimes). Would these have this glowing behaviour as well? What if this new behavious helps these fish to get eaten less by predators (glowing / strong colors often means "dangerous, I'm poisonous" in the animal world if I recall correctly), could it then be that these fish quickly replace their "unenhanced" counterparts?
- They breed like wildfire and are easy to raise in large numbers. (Imagine a big, big wall of fishtanks.)
- Their embryos are a convenient size and are completely transparent - you can see every organ in their bodies.
- You can watch the embryos continuously under the microscope for hours, or even days, at a time. (This is not true of, say, mouse embryos, which tend to become very unhappy once they are removed from the mother mouse.)
Of course, the fish used for science usually aren't designed to glow all over their bodies, all the time. That's fun for pets, but not very interesting. What scientists do is:- Find some protein that they think is important, like growth hormone.
- Find the gene for that protein. For human genes, you can do the equivalent of a Google search through the entire human genome. If you want the equivalent gene in zebrafish, you can take advantage of the zebrafish genome archives. There are also complete genomes for mice, Drosophila (fruit flies) and other creatures that are popular with scientists.
- Make a copy of the promoter for your interesting gene. (Genes, like email messages, are controlled by their headers. In genetics these headers are called "promoters". Basically, when the promoter gets activated, the cell starts to transcribe the gene and begins to produce the protein which the gene encodes.)
- Attach your copied promoter to the gene for a fluorescent protein (the most popular protein is Green Fluorescent Protein, known as GFP - but there are red, cyan and yellow ones as well.)
- Insert your new promoter+gene into an egg cell and grow a creature. Breed it a lot. Inbreed its offspring a lot until you have an extended family of genetically engineered creatures.
Now you have a creature which glows green or red only in the cells which are producing growth hormone. There are now dozens of strains of fish like this, each with a different promoter controlling the glow. And there are dozens of strains of mice as well.My lab uses transgenic, fluorescent mice to study how blood vessels grow. We are trying to learn how to prevent blood vessels from growing into tumors...
That operational definition of species isn't without its problems though. Some north american squirrels have a wide distribution across the continent, and they can all interbreed with their neighbors. However if you take one from the extreme north and the extreme south of their distribution they cannot mate. Furthermore there are "ring species", species with a ring shaped distribution. Some of these species have been introduced at one point on the ring, and spread around until they meet on the other side. Funny thing is, in some cases these animals cannot interbreed with the other arm of the ring distribution, but they can still exchange genes by going all the way around the ring. My memory is a little foggy, or I'd have better examples, but I got all of this from the book "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution" which was the subject of a Slashdot review.
I highly recommend it. Any university library should have it, if not I'm sure your local bookstore would be happy to order it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Zebra fish are difficult, but not impossible for the hobbyist to breed, what happens then?
Since the fish is covered by patent, what happens to the next generations? Are aquarists going to fall into the same trap as farmers, where they can't replant patented products?
Who wants to join my GNU/Fish project ?
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Yes, bummer indeed. When I first saw this post I thought they had created transgenic fish with luciferase, the enzyme that makes fireflies glow. Scientists have been inserting that into all sorts of critters recently for legitimate bioassay purposes. This BBC page has a number of exambles of both flourescent (using jellyfish proteins like these fish) and truly glow-in-the-dark critters.
A small nitpick regarding your terminology: two organisms that are able to breed to produce offspring are by definition the same species.
Incorrect. There are breeds of dog that cannot safely interbreed, yet they are all considered the same species. On the other hand, cross-species breeding can happen -- horses and donkeys, lions and tigers, and several "jungle" cats with domestic cats can, even sometimes producing fertile offspring.
(And that, of course, doesn't even consider the vast numbers of asexually reproducing species that such a definition couldn't even possibly apply to, or things like goat-sheep and quail-chick tetragametic chimeras.)
A species is whatever the current biological consensus calls a species. Factors like if crossbreeds occur naturally or normally produce fertile offspring for sexually reproducing species are taken into account, but a hard-and-fast definition does not and cannot exist.