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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.
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.
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 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.
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!
Animal models are how you do science to see what genes do.
In particular, zebrafish are popular for studying developmental biology, because they're clear as embryos and scientists can watch an organism form - in particular, they can mess up some genes and see what effect that has on the fish's development.
What's great about this clear fish line is that it brings the same see-through-vertebrate benefits to all kinds of other researchers.
Think of it as a debugging tool. It's a way to get printf statements while the code is still running, rather than just examining the core file after you seg fault.
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.
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.