Stories tagged genetic engineering
The HIV virus attacks white blood cells by latching onto a protein on their surface. People without that protein are immune from AIDS. Using that knowledge, scientists in Pennsylvania have figured out how to genetically manipulate mice so they, too, have the immunity.
The procedure has not yet been tested on humans. If it does work, it wouldn’t cure the disease, but it could let infected persons live healthier lives with the virus.
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Glowing green pigs: Just in time for St. Patrick's Day.
Courtesy johnmukA few years back scientists in Taiwan announced that they had genetically altered three cloned pigs so that they glowed fluorescent green. The feat was accomplished by injecting porcine embryos with fluorescent green protein from jellyfish.
Pigs are often used in studying human diseases.
In the Taiwanese experiment, the altered pigs’ internal organs glowed green throughout under ultraviolet light. On the outside they emitted a light green tint, particularly around their knuckles, eyes, and snout.
This week Chinese scientists announced that one of the altered pigs has successfully passed on its glow genes to some of its progeny. Two of 11 piglets born are displaying the same glowing traits their genetically engineered mother had been given in the lab. What this proves is that the sow remained fertile despite the engineering, and was able to pass on the altered gene.
The researchers hope the process will be useful in stem cell research and the monitoring of healing tissue during human transplants and other such procedures.
At last report, the mother pig was doing fine and glowing with pride.
Well... He's pretty funny and pathetic...: But don't you think he'd be a little funnier and sadder if we could see through him? (Photo by jepoirrer on flickr.com)Japanese scientists have struck the final, hilarious, and kind of yucky blow in the age-old fight to put frogs “back in their place.”
“Everyone already knows that dressing frogs up in clothing is pretty funny,” stated lead researcher Masayuki Sumida, professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University, “But a while back we started to wonder, ‘what if we went just the opposite way?’ What if we could create a completely naked frog?
“That would really show them who’s the boss,” added Sumida.
The IAB team would soon find, however, that creating a “naked” frog is much more difficult than one might assume. As it happens, merely removing the clothing that one has already put on a frog does not result in a naked frog. Instead what you end up with is simply a “frog.”
Taking the next logical step, the team attempted anesthetizing a frog, and removing its skin. This, they hoped, would overcome the amphibian’s natural defenses against nakedness. This experiment produced a suitably naked, but unfortunately “dead” frog, and, as the point of the experiment was to humiliate the creature, Sumida felt that the team must take a new direction.
For some time very little progress was made, and the team feared that the project’s funding would soon fall through, for lack of results. One night, however, a plucky young member of the research team remembered that the Japanese brown frog, or rena japonica carried two separate chromosomal slots, which, if occupied by specific recessive genes, could cause the normally dark colored frog to be born pale. Acting on a hunch, the researcher bred groups of frogs carrying the recessive genes. When a frog was finally produced that carried both sets of recessive genes, the team had their break through. This frog’s skin was so pale that it could actually be seen through (check out the picture). What’s more, the tadpoles with these genes bore similarly transparent skin, and one could “see dramatic changes of organs when tadpoles mutate into frogs.”
Sumida’s team hopes to patent this process for making see-through frogs, claiming that the creatures would make unique and invaluable study aids, or, at the very least, good conversation pieces.
The offspring of the transparent frogs share their parents’ traits. However, as an unexpected bonus insult to the frogs, by the next generation genetics seems to catch up, and the grandchildren die shortly after birth.
So where does research go from here? “It might seem like there’s not a lot more we could do to these little guys,” says a team spokesperson. “But we like to think that as long as there are frogs still around, we’re going to try and do something weird to them. Our next project? I don’t want to get too into it, but I’ll say this: glow-in-the-dark.”
A new weapon against mosquito-borne malaria may be... the mosquitoes themselves: Photo USDA
Researchers as Johns Hopkins University have genetically engineered a mosquito that is immune to malaria found in mice. The resistant mosquitoes caught the disease less often than wild bugs, and within a few generations widely outnumbered the non-resistant group.
Scientists warn that they are still a long way from developing a mosquito that is resistant to human malaria, let alone testing it or releasing it in the wild. But these early results indicate this could be a promising means of eradicating this deadly disease.
To learn more about malaria, visit the Science Museum’s on-line exhibit.
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