Has Anyone Seen My Rabbit? 92
New submitter writes "Scientists at the university of Hawaii have created glow in the dark rabbits. Where can I get my hands on one of these critters? It would drive the cats nuts! These guys are missing a bet, they could sell these things for big bucks and use the money to further fund their research. This is the perfect gift for the geek who has "everything"."
The technique used is similar to the glow in the dark cats bred a couple of years ago. The fluorescence isn't the end goal of course; it just happens to be a very obvious marker that their genetic manipulation technique works. According to the researchers, "the final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build, and be able to produce their own protein-based medication in animals."
Really, rabbits for milk? (Score:3)
Why rabbits? These aren't the first people to do this. Another group modified rabbits to produce human C1 inhibitor, but they only get 120 mL of milk per day. [nationalgeographic.com] Is this economical from a perspective of input feed to output milk?
Re:Really, rabbits for milk? (Score:5, Insightful)
At a guess, it's that rabbits make good experimental subjects when you want to work on mammals larger than mice and rats, because they're famous for breeding like ... um ... rabbits.
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Re:Really, rabbits for milk? (Score:5, Informative)
Rabbits reach sexual maturity in 4 months. Gestation is one month That means you can see the results of two, almost three generations of genetic manipulation in a year's study.
Cows, on the other hand take 10 months for gestation + age of safe breeding. If you're going to do genetic research, choosing the one that "multiplies like rabbits" is generally the way to go in a laboratory setting.
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Re:Really, rabbits for milk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why rabbits?
How many dairy cows could you fit into the same space?
Makes sense to experiment on the rabbits first. You'll need a small ranch to start experimenting on cows.
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The multiverse is still paying for that
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You know, I think Sheldon's glow in the dark fish night lights would sell like hot cakes.
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Hotcakes taste better...
You're getting to be a rabbit with me [youtube.com]
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But hot cakes ALWAYS sell like hot cakes.
The trick is to sell like hot cakes, only something much more profitable.
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(*)
The great country of Mexifornia is of course doing what they always do, declaring random things illegal. You may now send your angry letters [wikipedia.org] to El Presidente Brown
c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173
Sacramento, CA 95814
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On the plus side, we're creating a big Chinese child labor market to take advantage of kids' small hands to milk all those rabbits. No, wait....
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96iJsdGkl44 [youtube.com] Sony, because Caucasians are just too damn tall.
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Yea lets factory farm the hell out of rabbits to get the same volume of milk :/
They are using rabbits to test and refine the technology. Once they figure out how to do it with rabbits, they will move on to goats or cows. This is standard procedure for genetic manipulation: Get it working on microorganisms in a petri dish, then move on to mice, then to something bigger.
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Why rabbits? These aren't the first people to do this. Another group modified rabbits to produce human C1 inhibitor, but they only get 120 mL of milk per day. [nationalgeographic.com] Is this economical from a perspective of input feed to output milk?
As someone that worked in a lab before, rabbits are great because: They make enough milk, can be easily handled, studied, etc. and frankly we know a LOT about their genetic makeup. Oh - and it is easier to do egg manipulations and implantations on these creatures. Making changes in genes is a pain in the butt. Some animals are better suited for specific jobs. We used to get insulin from pigs since it was the best we could do at that time. We got better and now harvest a lot of it from insects.
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Have you ever tried to milk a rabbit? (Score:2)
It's easier just to use the juicer.
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Silly rabbit, milk is for kids!
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Yes! Exactly! Glow in the dark cows -- go big or go home!
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Now trying to work out how I would get a permit for one of those. Somehow I don't think it would fit through the existing cat flap to access the litter box though.
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And this solves the problem how? (Score:5, Insightful)
The drugs are expensive because of the patents on them that allow big pharma to monopolize them. In this case, the people who develop the genes will then be poached by big pharma, or will form their own company, or the university will sell the patents to an IP shop, which will leave us exactly where we were before. But we will have glowing rabbits.
So spare me the homilies about poor people and drugs, and just say "shiny glowing rabbits!!! FTW!!!"
Re:And this solves the problem how? (Score:4, Informative)
Or the countries that need cheap drugs the most will say "screw your IP law" and start breeding their own drug-producing rabbits (or whatever) regardless of what the WTO and similar organizations have to say. This kind of thing has already happened with more conventional methods of drug production [wikipedia.org] and there was a lot of kerfluffle but nobody went to war over it. Once any useful application of the laws of nature is out there, people will make use of it if they perceive doing so to be in their interests.
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Remember, you might be entitled to substantial compensation.
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Actually, the preferred term is "undocumented torte".
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Torts are a rounding error in the budgets of big pharma, hell even actual research is barely a blip, the development part of R&D is where all the money is spent, advertising and wining and dining doctors is where they focus their resources.
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New drugs are fundamentally expensive because the research costs are huge. Patents, much as we like to rant about them on /., are a distraction here.
However, there are plenty of old drugs, most of modern medicine really, long out of any patent, that are needed in developing nations. You first have to live long enough before you care whether Viagra is still covered by a patent.
We get excited by new cures, but many people can't depend on all the boring, long-known remedies being available.
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The drugs are expensive because of the patents on them that allow big pharma to monopolize them.
It's a long road from the research lab to clinical testing on humans to production and distribution of a new drug on a global scale --- and it takes time, money, manpower, organization and material resources to make that happen.
Without any certainty that major problems won't be exposed further on.
TFS says $1billion plant, $4.5billion R&D per (Score:4, Informative)
If only it were so easy.
TFS said:
"the final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build"
That BILLION dollars to build a plant meeting FDA style standards might have something to do with the cost. Figure one plant produces medicine for what, maybe a million people who need the drug(s) it produces? That would be $1 billion / 1 million = $1,000 / person just to build the thing. If you had 10 million people buying the medicine and one plant could produce enough for 10 million people, that's $100 / customer.
Add to that, 90% of medications don't make it through all of the trials and testing and get FDA approved. The one that gets approved needs to cover the cost of the nine that didn't make it. What does that R&D cost? Here are the numbers from all of the big pharma companies (All numbers are in millions, so 4,000 means $4 billion)/;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-truly-staggering-cost-of-inventing-new-drugs/ [forbes.com]
So I'm curious, how do you plan on covering the four or five billion dollar cost of developing a drug, if not buy patenting and selling it? Dollar cost COULD be drastically reduced by reducing safety regulations. Obviously that's trading for human cost, which sounds scary. On the other hand, consider that if the cost was cut by 30%, more people could get the medicine they need. That's the human cost of regulations that make it difficult to get medicine approved - when it costs $5 billion to make a new medicine, people suffer and die from things less expensive medicine could cure. Reducing regulations somewhat might very well reduce a lot of suffering. It's a hard problem. It sure would be nice if there was an easy answer, if you could just call the people who make new medicines evil and that would magically cause medicine to be developed, tested, and produced at no cost.
Too bad they were not created at Baskerville (Score:1)
Buttercup was it? BlueBell something like that
Just wait (Score:1)
Obligatory Mrs. Slocombe (Score:3)
FTFS: "glow in the dark cats"
"Captain Peacock, have you seen my pussy?"
--
BMO
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Also: "I must say your pussy is glowing tonight,"
Sherlock says 'Duh' (Score:1)
http://bbcsherlockpickuplines.tumblr.com/post/29594462174/you-light-up-my-life-like-a-baskerville-rabbit
Hmmm... could this be a solution...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Glowing in the dark would, I imagine, constitute a significant anti-survival trait for a creature such as this... If this trait gets passed on, could the technique be used to bring the rabbit population under control within a few dozen generations in areas where rabbits are nothing more than profound pests?
Or do you think would it reduce their chances of survival so low that they wouldn't even get to breed?
Re:Hmmm... could this be a solution...? (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't phosphorescent (what most people consider to be 'glow in the dark'), they are fluorescent. They only glow under UV (black light) exposure.
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But they might still glow to sharp eyed predators? Maybe?
fluorescent lagomorphs (Score:2)
I don't know about other birds of prey, but kestrels are able to track rodents easily because they can see the ultraviolet light reflected by their urine trails.
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White rabbits already glow under black light.
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First of all, "The GFP from A. victoria has a major excitation peak at a wavelength of 395 nm and a minor one at 475 nm." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein [wikipedia.org].
395 nm is near UV. Whenever we used unaltered GFP in the lab, we used UV lamps to excite it. You can use a blue light to excite the minor excitation peak, but then you really have to screw around with filters, especially if you want to photograph it. The blue light needs to be so bright that it overpowers the green fluorescence a
Re:Hmmm... could this be a solution...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Until owls start carrying UV flashlights, the fluorescent rabbits are probably safe.
If birds of prey start using electronics, we may have bigger problems on our hands.
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As another poster already mentioned some birds of prey can already see in the UV spectrum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision#Ultraviolet [wikipedia.org]
Now if birds start using electronics you better be prepared to be very afraid of birds. In comparison to the average bird of prey humans are blind.
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On a side note my 3 holland are SO DAMN CUTE. 2 Broken orange and one light grey 3
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Other respondents to this comment pointed out that these are fluorescent (ie need an excitation light source) not "glowing".
But another problem with this idea is that, in a population neutral alleles maintain their frequency (though can drift randomly) and deleterious alleles will decline in frequency. In other words, you'd have to release a LOT of rabbits before the glowing allele would be common enough to have an effect on average fitness and that allele would be unstable in the population. Unless you d
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Glow-in-the-dark cheese?
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Lots. That's why they're testing it.
Oryx and Crake redux (Score:2)
Girls Rabbit (Score:2)
When a girl asks me if I have seen her Rabbit [adamevetoys.com], I know it's not going well.
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Rabbits? DNA? (Score:2)
Rabbit girls [kaneva.com]!
That's what SHE said! (Score:2)
Obligatory quote from Baskerville (Score:3)
Sherlock Holmes: Bluebell, John! I've got Bluebell, the case of the vanishing glow-in-the-dark rabbit. NATO's in an uproar.
(For the uninformed: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942613/quotes?ref_=tttrv_sa_3 [imdb.com])
NOT GLOW IN THE DARK! FLUORESCENT!!! (Score:5, Informative)
At 0:48, they switch from a normal view of the bunnies to a the fluorescence. The reason it's a cut and not just flipping off the lights is that they put a green filter over the camera and set up a bright blue light shining on the bunnies. The green filter filters out the blue light but not the green light from the rabbits. You can see the one rabbit dims for a split second, that's because the beam of blue excitation light moves for a second. Turn off the blue light and those rabbits would go dark along with everything else. I suppose they'd glow for a very short time longer than anything else due to the fluorescence taking slightly longer, but it would be far too fast for you to perceive.
Here's an example of some GFP sample on the microscope [mecanusa.com]. Notice the bright blue light? That's what the article is calling "dark." (The orange filter in that example isn't the one you'd use to see fluorescence, it's what you'd use to keep you from blinding yourself by the blue light while moving the sample around.)
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My fiancee has a glow-in-the-dark rabbit! (Score:2)
TFA is shit (Score:1)
This was in Code of the Woosters (Score:2)
Who knew that PG Wodehouse was a science fiction writer!
Yet Another Step Toward... (Score:1)
It was delicious (Score:2)
You'd be better off... (Score:2)