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South Korean Scientists Create Glowing Dog
cultiv8 writes "A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic. The researchers, who completed a two-year test, said the ability to glow can be turned on or off by adding a drug to the dog's food. 'The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases,' the news agency quoted lead researcher Lee Byeong-chun as saying. He said the dog was created using the somatic cell nuclear transfer technology that the university team used to make the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005."
[dog barks]
damn dogs never let me sleep at night (closes window)
[dog glows]
damn dogs never let me sleep at night (closes curtains)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Ok this was a proof-of-concept experiment to make a transgenic dog using Dox-inducible expression. It might be useful for some stuff since dogs are a genetic model for some human diseases but still not THAT cool... What I am REALLY looking forward to is someone doing a homologous replacement of Tbx5 with Tbx4 in chickens (pehaps by using zinc finger nucleases). This would most likely change the development of the wings to front-legs. A four-legged chichken - THAT would be cool. When that proof-of concept experiment would be done we could do the same for a number of other birds - ostriches for example (would be neat riding beasts)... and with some proper breeding we might even be able to generate something similar to dinosaurs :P
While I don't mean to belittle the work done by these scientists, I want to point out a common mistake used in science journalism - referring to GFP as "glowing". It does not glow, in any sense of the word. It fluoresces, which means you need to shine blue or UV light on it and examine it through a filter that removes the incident light, and then it will appear green. It can appear quite amazing under those conditions, but you can't take this dog out for a walk at night and see it emitting green light. You won't even see it reflecting green light, unless you take him near a UV source.
There is a biological technique that does cause things to glow, but it's more complicated than a single protein so is not as commonly used as GFP.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Pics of the cute little sucker - both in the dark and in daylight:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/south-korean-scientists-create-glowing-dog-report-20110728-1i0wi.html
What is the fascination with making animals glow?
It's a quick and dirty way to test whether the inserted gene is being expressed in all tissues.
Step two is to attach your desired test gene to the bioluminescent gene. Now you can see where the test gene is being expressed. That removes the doubt from a failure to get the expected result; is it because the experimental treatment doesn't work properly, or because the gene isn't active in the desired tissue? Failure+glow means the treatment failed. Failure+no-glow means a problem with the insertion.
(IANAB, IANYB.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Curing stuff by triggering the disease? No thanks. Sounds more like genetically engineering people to have a built-in kill switch.
Professional Genius
Why this news? Dog is born puppy, then you feed it and it glowing. Keep feed it and it keep glowing until all glow up.
Meanwhile people whose child or spouse is spared from death by this same research feel quite differently about it.
So...are you saying you'd prefer they should stop all animal experimentation, or only those animals that are pets to someone out there? Which is quite a broad range of animals.
Or perhaps you prefer animals to be natural and not be messed about with humans? Which means that a significant number of dog breeds would be considered monstrous by you.
Or maybe you just mean genetic experiments? Or drug based? Or do you also consider experiments in changing their diet? Psychological experimentation? Environmental manipulation? Etc, etc.
They are trying to use non-human animals in place of humans since we have major gripes about human experimentation. As you consider all dogs to be at the "level" of humans, this would, of course, cause you discomfort. However, not everyone sees it like that. For some people, they seem to think that animals, dogs, cats, mice, naked mole rats, alpacas, baboons, slugs, roaches, cockatoos, parrots, etc are all more preferable to experiment on than human beings. Usually with an insane amount of oversight now (at least in the US of A), but they still trudge on to get this shit done.
Are they assholes? Who knows. If you talk to PETA, they're probably Satan himself, assfucking Hitler with Osama in the back (TOOT TOOT MAN TRAIN). If you talk to people that benefit from treatments pioneered and verified through animal testing, polio/heart surgery/leprosy/etc, would probably say they're decent people. If you talk to the people themselves, you'll probably find some of them just want to help people and damn the animals while others are bleeding hearts who'll drop out of animal experimentation after one too many puppies dying on them.
Do I think animal experimentation is good? Yes. Do I wish there were alternatives so we wouldn't have to do it? Hell yes. Would I prefer if we could use people who step forward and sell their bodies to science to get experimented on? Oh fuck yes. None of that ethical shit about "animals don't want to do it" or "it's cruel to them" if people stood up and said "YES, EXPERIMENT ON ME FOR A MILLION DOLLARS." Like that cow in Hitchhikers that wanted to be eaten.
Anyway, scientists aren't douchebags unless they're douchebags and experimenting on animals means very little as an indicator of their douchebaggery. It just means that you probably love animals a shitton more than these scientists, the people supporting these scientists, the people running oversight on these scientists, and the people raking money on the successes of these scientists.
The way that's written, my first thought was using dogs as bioweapons. I doubt that's really the case, so what do they really mean by this?
IAAB. It's equivalent to using a print statement as a report mechanism during debugging. In fact, this use of GFP is even called a "reporter" gene. There are other reporters commonly used; prior to the discovery of fluorescent proteins, the most popular bacterial reporter was a step in the lactose metabolism pathway that caused the colony to turn blue when it was interrupted by another gene (thus demonstrating not functionality, but that the gene had been inserted correctly into the carrier molecule.)
Another control mechanism that's often used is antibiotic resistance: if it doesn't die, then the resistance gene is where it should be. This has the added benefit of getting rid of the samples you don't want at the same time. Of course, neither of these are very useful for seeing tissue-specific expression, which is why fluorescent proteins revolutionized molecular biology when they were discovered.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Well, right now we have the ability to take memory dumps and compare them, creating a kind of rudimentary trace log. This shoddy JPEG of a microarray displays one column per gene of interest. Brightness reflects gene expression level (red is low, green is high, grey is in between.) Each row is a separate set of conditions, such as progress through a stress response.
In plant biology, time of day has been used as the y-axis, by taking many different samples at different times. This was done in order to find the genes responsible for changing between photosynthesis and respiration, and created a very cool and nifty image (in one of my textbooks that I don't have readily available) of all sorts of repeated and dynamic patterns, only a tiny fraction of which we understand—but at least we can see them!
Getting a kernel debugger, though, would require the ability to stop time instantly in order to equivalate interrupts and traps. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. :)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!