Amanda, only you would think of that.  I would think it would be very 
helpful if walking your dog after dark.

Rayilyn Brown
Director AZNPF
Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
[log in to unmask]

--------------------------------------------------
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 3:50 AM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Fluorescent cloned dog

> 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 
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>> 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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