Rubes Posted April 28, 2009 Posted April 28, 2009 Here's a good one: South Korean scientists say they have engineered four beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that could help develop cures for human diseases. Dogs that glow red. Sweet. Just think of the possibilities.... Oh, and something about this story just blows me away: A stellar explosion has smashed the record for most distant object in the known universe. The gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away, and represents a relic from when the universe was just 630 million years old. 13 billion light-years away. Billion. I mean, just one billion light-years is way beyond comprehensible. The distance light travels in a billion years? That's just freaking ridiculous. The distance light travels in a single year is almost hard to imagine. This is talking about the distance light travels in 13 billion years. WTF?
Ramius Posted April 28, 2009 Posted April 28, 2009 To be fair, they've had green glowing mice for years now, via GFP.
Rubes Posted April 28, 2009 Author Posted April 28, 2009 To be fair, they've had green glowing mice for years now, via GFP. I know they've made glowing cells, or cell components, but they've also had glowing organisms too? That's cool.
Glass To The Arson Posted April 28, 2009 Posted April 28, 2009 So the economy is in a complete sh*t hole... and we are concerned with making dogs glow?! wtffffffffffffffffff *************didnt realize it was korea
Wacka Posted April 29, 2009 Posted April 29, 2009 The important thing to get from the article is the cloning of the dogs, not that they glow. The dogs glow by RFP, red fluorescent protein. They must be pt under UV light to glow. I used to work at a company that utilized the firefly luciferase gene. Luciferase is the protein that acts on luciferin to produce the glow of fireflies. We put the gene into bacteria, yeast (me), tumor cells , and in transgenic mice (controlled by specific gene promoters (switches) so that it is expressed in certain tissues). We injected the mice with luciferin or added it to the growth medium (bacteria and yeast) and looked at it with very sensitive cameras in a light tight box. The advantage was that with previous methods, if you are testing antibiotics (bacteria) or chemo (tumor cells) you had to kill animals at each time point and then homogenize the tissues or dissect and weigh tumors. With the method the company had, you could look at the same animals at all time points and see the progression or regression of the disease. This saves mice and $. Eventually they laid a bunch of us off when private funding was drying up. They later went public and were bought by another company when the investors wanted to cash out. After we were let go they came out with a camera unit that could get a 3-D image of the glowing in the mouse.
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