handy for walks after dark but are their "deposits" flourescent ? :)

Quoting rayilynlee <[log in to unmask]>:

> Fluorescent puppy is world's first transgenic dog 
>   a.. 12:00 23 April 2009 by Ewen Callaway 
>   b.. For similar stories, visit the GM Organisms and Genetics Topic Guides 
> A cloned beagle named Ruppy - short for Ruby Puppy - is the world's first
> transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein
> that glows red under ultraviolet light.
> 
> A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea
> created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent
> gene produced by sea anemones.
> 
> Lee and stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang were part of a team that created
> the first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Much of Hwang's work on human cells
> turned out to be fraudulent, but Snuppy was not, an investigation later
> concluded.
> 
> This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic
> dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University
> of Kentucky in Lexington. "The next step for us is to generate a true disease
> model," he says.
> 
> However, other researchers who study domestic dogs as stand-ins for human
> disease are less certain that transgenic dogs will become widespread in
> research.
> 
> Dogs already serve as models for diseases such as narcolepsy, certain cancers
> and blindness. And a dog genome sequence has made the animals an even more
> useful model by quickening the search for disease-causing genes. Most dog
> genetics researchers limit their work to gene scans of DNA collected from
> hundreds of pet owners.
> 
> Making a glowing dog
> Lee's team created Ruppy by first infecting dog fibroblast cells with a virus
> that inserted the fluorescent gene into a cell's nucleus. They then
> transferred the fibroblast's nucleus to another dog's egg cell, with its
> nucleus removed. After a week dividing in a Petri dish, researchers implanted
> the cloned embryo into a surrogate mother.
> 
> Starting with 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, Lee's team ended up with
> seven pregnancies. One fetus died about half way through term, while an
> 11-week-old puppy died of pneumonia after its mother accidentally bit its
> chest. Five dogs are alive, healthy and starting to spawn their own
> fluorescent puppies, Ko says.
> 
> Besides the low efficiency of cloning - just 1.7 per cent of embryos came to
> term - another challenge to creating transgenic dogs is controlling where in
> the nuclear DNA a foreign gene lands. Lee's team used a retrovirus to
> transfer the fluorescent gene to dog fibroblast cells, but they could not
> control where the virus inserted the gene.
> 
> This would seem to prevent researchers from making dog "knockouts" lacking a
> specific gene or engineering dogs that produce mutant forms of a gene. These
> knockout procedures are now commonly done in mice and rats, and three
> researchers earned a Nobel prize in 2007 for developing this method, called
> "gene targeting".
> 
> No bright future?
> Ko is working to adapt a procedure used so far in pigs, cows and other
> animals to target genes in cloned dogs. His lab hopes to knock out a specific
> oestrogen receptor in dogs to understand the hormone's effects on fertility.
> 
> The long lifespan of dogs and their reproductive cycle could make them more
> relevant to human fertility than mice, he says. "I think these dogs will be a
> very useful model for our research."
> 
> Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Stanford University who studies dogs as models of
> human disease, says creating a transgenic dog is "an important
> accomplishment", showing that cloning and transgenesis can be applied to a
> wide range of mammals.
> 
> "I do not know of specific situations where the ability to produce transgenic
> dogs represents an immediate experimental opportunity," Barsh adds. But
> transgenic dogs will give researchers another potential tool to understand
> disease.
> 
> However, Nathan Sutter, a geneticist specialising in dogs at Cornell
> University in Ithaca, New York, says "transgenesis is labourious, expensive
> and slow".
> 
> Add the expense of caring for laboratory-reared dogs and negative public
> perceptions and it could mean few researchers turn to transgenic dogs like
> Ruppy, he says: "it's not on my horizon as a dog geneticist at all."
> 
> Journal reference: genesis (DOI: 10.1002/dvg.20504)
> 
> If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or
> online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New
> Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing
> options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
> 
> Rayilyn Brown
> Director AZNPF
> Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
> [log in to unmask]
> 
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