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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 >> 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] >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: >> mailto:[log in to unmask] >> In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn > > > > > ---------------------------------------------- > This mail sent through http://www.ukonline.net > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: > mailto:[log in to unmask] > In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn