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Cool Scientists Create Glowing Mice 32

Posted by chrisd from the rave-scene-marsupials dept.
A user writes "MSNBC is reporting that San Diego-based Anticancer, Inc. has sucessfully implanted the genes of a jellyfish in the hair follicles of mice, creating glowing mice... more here" Glowing elephants would be a cooler trick.
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Cool Scientists Create Glowing Mice More

Cool Scientists Create Glowing Mice

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  • The Horror (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 )
    Vivisection is wrong

    • True. But so's doing untried procedures on humans.
      • Nagasaki.

        Depleted uranium bullets.

        LSD on soldiers.

        There are so many examples it's staggering.

        Common thread? Govt. Agencies.

        Not to sound like the XFiles but you're probably more likely to be killed by the government you voted for than somebody elses. [wild speculation, of course!]

        • Yeah, only a handful of people a year die from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, car accidents, murders, but nowhere near as many as the U.S. government slaughters of its citizens.

          Ironically, only one of the items you list was actually directed against American citizens. I don't recall Nagasaki being an American city. Do you?

          • as usual

            1. America is not the world

            I was contending that I am more likely to get killed by my own government's medical experiments or "health programmes" than I am being killed by a foreign government agency.

            You notice that I didn't say "Americans are more likely to get killed by American government officials than being run over and killed in the street."

            #include insult.h

  • Sick (Score:2, Insightful)

    by romanm ( 178782 )
    You call fiddling about with some small creature's life "a cool thing"? IMHO this is just plain sick.

    • Re:Sick (Score:4, Interesting)

      by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Friday September 13, 2002 @07:59AM (#4250377) Homepage
      You've missed the point. The aim of the experiment isn't to make a small patch of fur on a mouse go green, that's pretty useless. The real aim of the experiment is to inject a set of genes into a live animal, so that cells take up the genes and grow.

      They only used the flourescent marker to show that they'd successfully pushed the genes into the cells. It's not at all easy to push genes into a grown animal, the cell walls tend to not let any proteins in. In this case, they've apparently succeeded quite well.

      Getting genes into an adult animal is a very important step forward. Some diseases may be curable with this kind of technique, for example, type-1 diabetes; which kills millions of people, might be tackled by treating a small area of skin to produce insulin at the right times.

      • They only used the flourescent marker to show that they'd successfully pushed the genes into the cells. It's not at all easy to push genes into a grown animal, the cell walls tend to not let any proteins in. In this case, they've apparently succeeded quite well.

        1. Animals do not have cell walls.
        2. A cell would not survive if its membrane didn't allow proteins to enter
        • 1. Animals do not have cell walls.

          Ok, call it what you want. It's a cell membrane or something.

          2. A cell would not survive if its membrane didn't allow proteins to enter

          True, I said "tend not to" but you know what I meant. They let proteins in in quite controlled ways, and hormones and such like. Basically each cell has it's very own firewall ;-) But the fact remains, getting DNA or RNA proteins successfully into the cell nucleus isn't all that easy.

  • Glowing elephants would be a cooler trick.

    Yup, it would - but unfortunately the elephant has a much longer gestation period -- nearly two years! That'd make for very slow generations in the lab, don't you think?
    • This was genetic engineering wayyy after gestation. They took a piece of fully grown skin and treated it, then transplanted it onto a mouse.

      There are practical problems about going near an animal that weighs tonnes and never forgets with sharp pointy instruments, but that's another question, and easily answered one at that.

  • Sheep (Score:2)

    by Perdo ( 151843 )
    With spider web protien for hair.

    Beats goats with spider web protien for milk..ug.

    Added bonus: you have to shear sheep anyway, except now your sweater is potentially bulletproof.
  • "Hows the cure for cancer coming along Smithers?"
    "Well, I made these mice that glow in the dark...."
    "Pah, we've had those in the reactor for three years, you're fired!"
  • WTF has this got to do with curing cansor.

    On a side note. Does any one remember thoes old Redybreck adverts with the glowing children. Now we can make that a reality.

  • Yep (Score:4, Funny)

    by Treeluvinhippy ( 545814 ) <liquidsorcery.gmail@com> on Friday September 13, 2002 @05:59AM (#4250199)
    This is definatly going to be the next big thing at raves.
    • Wonder if it works on the male anatomy?

      Add in some viagara secretion to the patch of skin for good measure, you get an erection and it lights up! ;-)

      Or even better- melatonatan! You get an all-over tan and a permanent erection! Isn't technology wonderful ;-)

  • A french lab has alread made 'glow-in-the-dark' rabbits (so the ovaries glow, which are used for research purposes). This is done by splicing the protein that causes a jellyfish to glow into a rabbit zygote.

    I can't see how glowing hair is going to be useful. anyhow, have a look at this [wired.com], which covers a bit about it (the article is about an artist trying to get one of the glowing rabbits for an exhibition)

    • They've done it in an adult. That means that they can inject genes into a patch of skin, and that patch of skin can do an extremely wide variety of things.

      For example, it can turn colour depending on the level of insulin, or temperature, or it can produce insulin, or growth hormone (if you are lacking in it). Or it could produce antibiotics, or other chemicals; vitamins for example.

  • After all, according to "The Truth" [thetruth.com] ads, you can make glowing mice simply by making them smoke cigarettes. And with a name like "The Truth", it must be true, right? :)

  • Scientists have been doing this for years.
  • Mice whose fur glows green may be the first step to using gene therapy to treat hair loss, baldness and perhaps even to permanently change hair color, researchers say.

    As long as the hair color you want is glowing green, of course.
  • That explains the glowing hot pink elephants I saw walking home from the bar last night. I thought it was time to stop drinking.
  • Thanks, science! This would make my old cat's job a little bit easier... no more night-vision kitty goggles required ...

    --matt
  • Don't get too excited folks. At the levels GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) can be expressed in the tissues of non-indogenous organisms (that is, non-jellyfish organisms), and at the efficiency it works fluorescently in those organisms, GFP only glows green under Ultra-Violet light.

    In other words, if you just turn off the light, these mice aren't going to be growing. The authors of the article could have at least done a little bit of research, and thus been able to say "under UV light" rather than "under a certain kind of light".

    Also note that this is nothing new. GFP has been put into tobacco plants, which subsequently allows their vascular structure to be easily determined under UV light (actaully, the tobacco plant had luciferase, an enzyme expressed in lightning bugs which allows them to glow). It is also used in every biology lab for studying organisms. You fuse GFP with your favorite protein, then you can track your favorite protein in cells via a UV microscrope.

    Less known is that there other fluorescent proteins aside from GFP. As mentioned before, there is also luciferase. There's also Yellow Fluorescent Proein (YFP), enhanced Yellow Fluorescent Protein (EYFP), and Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP), among others. This is very useful for biologists because it allows us to track different proteins in a cell at the same time, by creating fusion proteins.

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