Green Eggs and Ham?

By Chris Deitch (41427365)

Glow-in-the-dark chickens, pigs, and the new technology that made them are revolutionising the world of transgenic animals…

Scientists working at the widely recognised Roslin Institute in the UK, made famous by ‘Dolly’ the sheep, have created a new technique for modifying the genetic make-up of animals.

Using their newly developed method scientists plucked the fluorescent gene from a species of jellyfish called Aequorea victoria. The particular gene responsible for Green Fluorescent Protein (or what scientists call GFP) was identified and then separated from the jellyfish. In the new technique, scientist used viruses from the lentivirus family to carry the chosen gene into the fertilised eggs of the chickens and pigs. Once the eggs were altered they were then implanted in surrogate mothers and raised naturally. The Roslin scientists are ‘piggybacking’ on the medical research regarding lentiviruses as a way of producing transgenic animals.

Traditional efforts of creating transgenic animals, which have been significantly more expensive and often hampered by inefficient production, see only one in seventy embryos resulting in a genetically modified animal, that’s a 1.4% success rate! The improved technique is proving to be 10 to 100-fold more efficient than the old techniques, with the majority, rather than the minority, of animals ending up transgenic. The new technique, that modifies an animal’s genetic make-up, is set to pave the way for producing animals resistant to disease in a highly efficient manner.

Read more on:

The benefits of transgenic animals | click here!

The role of transgenic animals in biomedical research | click here!

Frequently asked questions about transgenic animals | click here!