Transgenic Zebrafish Produced Using Cultured Sperm

understyled writes "According to this article, researchers from Fukui Prefectural University in Obama, Japan, and the National Human Genome Research Institute have produced genetically modified zebrafish using sperm cells grown "in vitro." "The secret to our success was the idea of placing a layer of special 'feeder cells' under the spermatagonia in the laboratory dish. These feeder cells, derived from zebrafish testicular cancer cell lines, promote the growth of spermatagonia and stimulate them to mature into functional sperm," said Dr. Sakai, the study's senior author and a reproductive biologist."

Glow in the dark?

[OneBarG]

Who cares about fish that don't glow in the dark? Regular fish are so boring now. At least give it an extra eye or a few asses.

Re:Glow in the dark?

[SkewlD00d]

"This fish is no good to me, it has only one ass."

In otherwords, so they've generated sperm in a dish? *Yikes*! I guess men's days are numbered.

Next step, proteonics & functional genome cataloging & engineering. Then, we will have complete computational models for every organism, including human, and be able to solve virtually every possible disease pathway through computationally generated cures.

Conquer death? If we could save our perfectly sequenced copies of our DNA at birh, could we potent

Re:Glow in the dark?

[datababe72]

And while we're at it, we solve world hunger and bring peace to the entire world.... sounds like an excellent beauty contest speech.

First of all, we don't even know how many genes are in the human genome. We're still arguing over that, although best estimates are ~30,000.

Even if we did have a catalogue of all the genes, we don't have ANY clue what ~30% of them do. And there are many, many more where the most we can say is "this looks like a protease" (protease = protein that cuts up other proteins, if you

When will it end?

[kinnell]

First tomato/scorpion hybrids, now fish/zebra hybrids. What's next, flying pigs?

huh-huh-huh

[quakeslut]

he said sperm.

Cultured Sperm?

[EnglishTim]

For some reason I get an image in my mind of a gamete with handlebar moustache and monocle..

These should be outlawed immediately

[ObviousGuy]

If you don't put your foot down on these transgenics now, next thing you know they'll be demanding marriage rights and spouse benefits.

I don't think we'll need to worry about that . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . at least until start pulling cat girls or other furry-bait out of them petri dishes.

On the other hand, we might end up having to pony up for lifelong psychotherapy for these guys, what with their being descended from cancer cells. Talk about a major self esteem hit.

Stefan

Obligatory...

[Zarf]

I for one welcome our transgenic zebra fish sperm producing overlords.

I'm so sorry I couldn't help myself. Please mod me down... I must be punished.

spermatagonia

[aminorex]

This suggests a great branding strategy
for khaki pants.

MY eyes!

[rjw57]

I /so/ read 'spam' instead of 'sperm' there.

Re:MY eyes!

[thelenm]

Me too... and I tried hard to make sense of "cultured spam" before I took a closer look. The only thing I could guess was the spam that's been sitting on my hard drive for a few years. But what that had to do with zebrafish...?

I didn't know...

[andy666]

....that your mother was a zebrafish. I thought her name was 'Mars'. (See last poll.)