Cloned, Glow in the Dark Cats

eldavojohn writes "Well, you can finally get genetically modified cloned animals. South Korean scientists have shown it is possible to alter a protein via therapeutic cloning to 'artificially [create] animals with human illnesses linked to genetic causes.' The images of these animals are amazing. This research was headed by Kong Il-keun, the first person in the country to clone cats in 2004." There is always the chance that this is a hoax, but far too amusing to ignore.

hrmmmm

[BWJones]

Those images do not look like images representative of cloned GFP containing animals that I have seen. Rather the green cat look slike the image was taken through a green filter or filtered light and the cat on the left simply looks illuminated by a laser. Whether or not these animals truly represent transgenic fluorescent animals from these images at least leaves me suspicious...

Not entirely new, but still cool

[stranger_to_himself]

Whereas this might be the first glow in the dark cat (for which I can think of many, many uses), there have been glow in the dark mice [bbc.co.uk] for ages (although now I wonder for how much longer). Also many animal models for human genetic diseases already exist, including fruitfly with early onset Alzheimer's disease [unisci.com], and mice with Down syndrome [bbc.co.uk]. I'm sure there are tons more.

these cats don't glow, they reflect

[teeloo]

According to the article, these cats only look that way under ultraviolet light. People often confuse FLUORESCENCE with PHOSPHORESCESCENCE. The latter is transmissive and the former is refective. From Wiki: Phosphorescence is a specific type of photoluminescence related to fluorescence. Unlike fluorescence, a phosphorescent material does not immediately re-emit the radiation it absorbs. The slower time scales of the re-emission are associated with "forbidden" energy state transitions in quantum mechanics. As these transitions occur less often in certain materials, absorbed radiation may be re-emitted at a lower intensity for up to several hours. In simpler terms, phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. This is in some cases the mechanism used for "glow-in-the-dark" materials which are "charged" by exposure to light. Unlike the relatively swift reactions in a common fluorescent tube, phosphorescent materials used for these materials absorb the energy and "store" it for a longer time as the subatomic reactions required to re-emit the light occur less often.

Re:Astoundingly disturbing and irresponsible

[Hatta]

You have no idea what you're talking about. They inserted a single jellyfish gene under the control of a specific promoter into the cat's genome. Explain to me in detail how this is going to cause diseases to jump from cats to humans. Oh right, you can't because you have no idea what you're talking about.

Please, there's already enough misinformed scare mongering going on in the biological sciences. If you don't know what you're talking about, STFU.

Re:hrmmmm

[Smidge204]

Don't forget that an external UV light is required, rather than the skin glowing all by itself. The hair blocks the UV light from getting to the skin, and any glow from what little does get through it blocked on the way out.

=Smidge=

For research only

[heroine]

This is for research only, so U can see if a protein is expressed by attaching a UV marker to it. It also doesn't glow unless U shine UV light on it. Don't expect glowing cats in pet stores.

Re:Astoundingly disturbing and irresponsible

[randyest]

I'm afraid you don't, really.

a) Yes we do [jbc.org] have a good picture of the jellyfish genome and what genes interact with the glow gene (warning PDF and sciency stuff.)

b) How are we supposed to have a "complete understanding" of the modified organism without making one?

Glow in the dark?

[nurb432]

No, they are florescent according to the article. That wouldn't qualify as 'glow in the dark' since they dont make their own light.

still cool tho.

You excite red red FP with green light not UV

[BurningRome]

I use red fluorescent protein all the time in the lab - the photo in TFA looks pretty real to me, as you excite RFP with green coloured light (around 510-555 nm) to cause it to emit red fluorescence (607-610 nm for mRFP1/mCherry). TFA didn't say which of the many RFPs they used to make the cats, but if they did, and you wanted to see the fluorescence, you'd have to illuminate the cat in the dark with a green-wavelength light to see the red fluoro emission. And a nonfluorescent cat with white fur would appear to be green. Because the RFP cat has white fur (or so the article says), it would look greenish too, so they must have done something to avoid that and still make the red fluoresce.

Why I though about a prank

[DrYak]

There's no reason to think this was a hoax. Just because some other korean researcher committed fraud doesn't mean that *this* guy did.

No, not because some researcher who happened to be from the same country made one.
Because fluorescent cats obviously look silly (and thus make very good prank material), and don't make really sense from a scientific point of view :
- They are seldom used in research nowadays (for the reasons I said before : it's cheaper to work with smaller mammals or even simplier subjects if you don't need mamals)
- Cloning cats has already been done.
- The only new thing is having cloned cats *with* a mutation, for which, as I said, I fail to see advantages that aren't offered already by cloned genetically engineered mice (with the added bonus of being easier and faster to breed).

- This is not Nature, this is the "Bizness" section of Korea Times.

Also for the finer details :
- As far as I know, cat fur doesn't tend to glow green in ultra violet light (in fact, for what I know, most animal furs don't glow in UV light which is handy to help diagnosing fungi-infections which DO glow in UV light. Also known as "Wood's lamp test" in Dermatology).
Thus, this image may be photoshoped by TFA's author as a prank and not pulled out of a real scientific paper.
- Angora species wouldn't have been the best species to show of body fluorescence (because of the thick fur blocking the light)

That's why I initially suspected that TFA may be a prank.

But then, some googling [google.com] around revealed that there was actually a paper [biolreprod.org] published in Biology of Evolution.
So this maybe isn't a prank, after all.

Also, your argument about it being hard to clone animals "higher up on the evolutionary tree" is just silly. The first animals to be cloned were *sheep*. Don't you remember? It wasn't *that* many years ago...

Dolly was the first cloned *mammal*.
Other species have been cloned before that.

When going "higher up on the evolutionary" we start to see appearing a lot of peculiar modification on the DNA : epigenetic modification. That's information not contained inside the sequence, but additional modification made to the DNA molecule. It differs a lot between somatic cells and germ-line cells. As a matter of fact, they even differ between genetic material you received from your mother and genetic material you received from your father. Also somatic cell may have accumulated some damage and mutation (that's why there are mechanisms such as telomers to keep count of division cycles and may be part of the explanation of why somatic cells don't divide much).
Thus, when cloning mammals you're starting with very poor quality material.

As a result, the yields aren't very good :
- With dolly, 277 eggs were used to create 29 embryos. Three lambs where born, only Dolly survived.
- With the fluo-cat : 176 embryo were implanted in 11 surrogate mothers. Only 3 successful pregnancies, with only 2 live kitten at arrival.

In comparison, frogs are much more easy to clone (probably because one may find nice undifferentiated cells in their body to get clean material for cloning)

Mice are also known to have higher success rate (Dolly was around ~0.3%. First mouse cloning experiment encountered ~2% success rate), probably because of slightly less DNA modification hampering the cloning procedure.

Also mice have another big advantage above cats in cloning :
- once you got at least a couple of cloned mice, it's then very easy to produce a huge amount of this peculiar strain of mice, simply by controlled selective breeding of you clones, because mice are quickly fertile and reproduce very quickly.

There's actually no reason that no humans have been cloned except for ethical concerns (or

Re:I HAZ

[d3vo1d]

Speaking of lolcats Nice post http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/12/12/yur-glowstix-wi-eated-dem/ [icanhascheezburger.com]