Fluorescent Puppies

The world’s first transgenic dogs are a litter of four cloned beagles that glow red under ultraviolet light. The puppies were cloned by a team led by scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea. They used a virus to infect canine fibroblast cells with the glowing gene, then cloned cells to produce 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, producing seven pregnancies.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Lee and stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang were part of a team that created the first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005. Much of Hwang's work on human cells turned out to be fraudulent, but Snuppy was not, an investigation later concluded.

This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model," he says.

Link -via Buzzfeed

See also: Fluorescent cats, fish, pigs, and rabbits.