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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.
From their FAQ:
What if a fluorescent zebra fish is eaten? Eating a fluorescent zebra fish is the same as eating any other zebra fish. Their fluorescence is derived from a naturally occurring gene and is completely safe for the environment. Just as eating a blue fish would not turn a predator blue, eating a fluorescent fish would not make a predator fluoresce.
Bummer, I was hoping to see fluorescent cats!
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
I've had about 5 fish, only one of them lived longer than a week.
With a few of these and one of these you'd have a way cool case.
Who needs cold cathodes?
You know, this has gone too far. Genetic engineering just for the heck of it? What purpose do a glowing fish have?
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Glowing Fish are First Genetically Engineered Pets
;-)
I bet cats will indirectly become the second
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
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
Couldn't they have chosen a better color than red? I just have this image of a kid curled up in bed at night, unable to sleep staring at this ominous red glowing fish all night.
GloFish, eh? I think I'll wait for Dopefish to be available as pet.
Look here (and following cartoons :))
The methods used may be different but just about every breed of dog known to Man has been 'genetically engineered.' For example, I have a Boston Terrier. The Boston was created in 1857 as a dog fighter by breeding English Bulldogs and English Terriers. Therefore, the Boston was engineered. Take any dog and you'll find that someone wanted a dog that could do this or that or was such a size so they went about selecting different existing species and breeding them to create their perfect dog. So many people think that genetic engineering is done with test tubes but any time two species are brought together artificially you are engineering genetics. Mendel was a genetic engineer and he lived in the 1100s.
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I'm a little disappointed. These aren't bioluminescent-type glow-in-the-dark fish like the ones that live in the deep sea. They're fluorescent glow-in-the-UV fish like the ones that live in the rave.
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
It's relly to bad that some won't have a single geneticly altered item without rasing havoc. We have been altering plants for centuries by cross breeding. This results in a new type of plant that the changed genes are not controlled. I find that far more disturbing than changing one gene that has a known effect on an organism.
I realise that there will be things that are genetically altered for the worse. They will either be an experiment or from the mind of someone who intends to do wrong. this is where the line should be drawn... for those who intend to do harm with genetics. Otherwise it is intended for the betterment of society.
All of the stories you've heard about the genetically altered badities - the Hulk, the tenage mutant ninja turtles, the monkey with 4 asses... are just that, stories. Until the haze of negativity is lifted from genetics we can only make small steps, like making fish glow.
The original generic sig.
We all know that these genetically engineered glowing fish are evil!
I want glow-in-the-dark anchovies so I can watch LOTR in the dark and still eat pizza!
TT
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--
There's a difference between breeding which requires two animals that can naturally have sex with each other to mix genes naturally...
(Two people of a different race having children isn't genetic engineering.)
And genetic engineering which completely removes the neccessity for having two creatures have sex to mix the genes. The entire process is dependent on human intervention.
The former is natural selection. The latter is intelligent design.
This fish was given genes from a species it could never naturally mate with. Dogs were mated with other dogs they could naturally mate with.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
- 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...
I can assure the world that I am Mostly Harmless.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Personally, I'm waiting for cabbits. But only the ones that transform into either spacecraft or mechas.
[Insert pithy quote here]
If you eat the fish, and go to the washroom, will it glow in the dark? Cuz I'm pretty sure that would be somewhat spooky to leave there in the dark :)
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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?
I am not saying "all GM is good, let's go" - quite the contrary:
The mindless anti-GM zelots can prevent things that really help - I would love to see a GM crop that fixed nitrogen like a legume, yielded lots of bio-desiel and plastic precursors, and could be grown year after year in brackish soil, concentrating the salt in the stalks - imagine the boost to the environment and the boost to the third world farmer! But you can bet that, even if an RMS-inspired botanist created such a crop and released it free of charge (think George Washington Carver), the mindless anti-GMers would prevent it from seeing the light of day!
In short, BE worried about things, but have a clearly reasoned, well thought through idea of WHY you are worried - not just because the thing has "scary" words in it like "genetically modified", "nuclear", or "diesel"!
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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.
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.
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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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Maybe it would be better if we stopped toying with nature. Maybe we should leave the four-assed monkeys schematics alone and let nature take its course...
I am dead serious, by the way.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
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.
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
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.
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.
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