Transgenic Zebrafish Produced Using Cultured Sperm

understyled writes "According to this article, researchers from Fukui Prefectural University in Obama, Japan, and the National Human Genome Research Institute have produced genetically modified zebrafish using sperm cells grown "in vitro." "The secret to our success was the idea of placing a layer of special 'feeder cells' under the spermatagonia in the laboratory dish. These feeder cells, derived from zebrafish testicular cancer cell lines, promote the growth of spermatagonia and stimulate them to mature into functional sperm," said Dr. Sakai, the study's senior author and a reproductive biologist."

Comments

Glow in the dark?

[OneBarG]

Who cares about fish that don't glow in the dark? Regular fish are so boring now. At least give it an extra eye or a few asses.

Re:Glow in the dark?

[SkewlD00d]

"This fish is no good to me, it has only one ass."

In otherwords, so they've generated sperm in a dish? *Yikes*! I guess men's days are numbered.

Next step, proteonics & functional genome cataloging & engineering. Then, we will have complete computational models for every organism, including human, and be able to solve virtually every possible disease pathway through computationally generated cures.

Conquer death? If we could save our perfectly sequenced copies of our DNA at birh, could we potentially use gene therapy to patch our faulty genes? Granted that different faults are distributed throughout different cells; we're like a collection of bad photocopies of our original cells. The other problem is non-dividing/replaceable tissues (women's egg sacks, nerve cells, etc.). The other problem is entropy... how much material/labor/power/heat/money would be required to return you to a more pristiene state? In the future though, I suspect it would be possible to extend life to around 1000 yrs.

"What a Brave New World, with such geeks in it."

Re:Glow in the dark?

[datababe72]

And while we're at it, we solve world hunger and bring peace to the entire world.... sounds like an excellent beauty contest speech.

First of all, we don't even know how many genes are in the human genome. We're still arguing over that, although best estimates are ~30,000.

Even if we did have a catalogue of all the genes, we don't have ANY clue what ~30% of them do. And there are many, many more where the most we can say is "this looks like a protease" (protease = protein that cuts up other proteins, if you're curious). Or "gene upregulated in stomach cancer". Not very helpful.

Even if we manage to work out what all the genes do, we don't know how they interact.

Even if we knew how they interacted, that is a far cry from being able to accurately model the normal and pathogenic states associated with these genes and their interactions.

Even if we could generate the models, we don't necessarily know how to create a small molecule drug that will intervene in the pathogenic process and set things right.

People are working on all of these issues, but I think most scientists would agree that we are years, in fact decades, from being able to solve "virtually every possible disease pathway through computationally generated cures".

As for making perfect copies of our DNA at birth... a lot of the "errors" are really polymorphisms that you are born with. Environmental effects determine whether or not the "error" is a problem for your health. Or you pick up one more mutation during life, and that together with the already existing polymorphism leads to cancer or whatnot.

So in short... its not that easy. Not even remotely that easy.

When will it end?

[kinnell]

First tomato/scorpion hybrids, now fish/zebra hybrids. What's next, flying pigs?

huh-huh-huh

[quakeslut]

he said sperm.

Cultured Sperm?

[EnglishTim]

For some reason I get an image in my mind of a gamete with handlebar moustache and monocle..

These should be outlawed immediately

[ObviousGuy]

If you don't put your foot down on these transgenics now, next thing you know they'll be demanding marriage rights and spouse benefits.

Obligatory...

[Zarf]

I for one welcome our transgenic zebra fish sperm producing overlords.

I'm so sorry I couldn't help myself. Please mod me down... I must be punished.

spermatagonia

[aminorex]

This suggests a great branding strategy
for khaki pants.

Re:spermatagonia

[Anonymous Coward]

i prefer to think of it as:
[contorted face] I'm about to spermatag all over you! I'm gonna spermatagoniaaaaa

MY eyes!

[rjw57]

I /so/ read 'spam' instead of 'sperm' there.

Re:MY eyes!

[thelenm]

Me too... and I tried hard to make sense of "cultured spam" before I took a closer look. The only thing I could guess was the spam that's been sitting on my hard drive for a few years. But what that had to do with zebrafish...?

I didn't know...

[andy666]

....that your mother was a zebrafish. I thought her name was 'Mars'. (See last poll.)

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

when will we be seeing metroid and space pirate breeding programs from this?

Soon there will be no GloFish for sale

[MonkeysKickAss]

There will be no glowing zebrafish at Petco becuase they are soon no longer going to be able to sell glowing fish because there is a chance that they might some how get released into the ocean and they would breed with the other zebrafish and the number of glowing zebrafish would get out of control. They have already banned the sale of them in Britain

I don't think we'll need to worry about that . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . at least until start pulling cat girls or other furry-bait out of them petri dishes.

On the other hand, we might end up having to pony up for lifelong psychotherapy for these guys, what with their being descended from cancer cells. Talk about a major self esteem hit.

Stefan