An illuminating gene taken from a sea anemone was added to the dog.
Would you clone your dog? Today it is possible, even if it costs a fortune.
Koreans are good at this. They created the world’s first cloned dog 17 years ago and have now developed the technology.
Fresh in the study a group of Koreans cloned two beagles from the skin cells of another dog and added a gene taken from a sea anemone. As a result, the wounds shimmer in UV light.
Why why did they do that, someone might wonder now, and deserves an answer to his question.
The researchers experimented with combining gene editing with nuclear transfer technology. In nuclear transplantation, a cell is taken from the animal to be cloned, for example from the skin. The nucleus of this cell is transferred to an empty egg taken from another dog, from which the cell nucleus has been removed.
This cell contains the entire genetic makeup of the animal to be cloned. This egg is then electrocuted like Dr. Frankenstein in his laboratory.
Research shows how to make a beagle’s paws glow.
The electricity glues the foreign cell nucleus to the egg and causes it to divide. Then the cell is placed in another dog’s womb to grow and the resulting wound is a perfect clone of the dog from whose skin the original cell was taken.
In a research mind the group also turned off one gene in the dog’s DNA that is linked to Parkinson’s disease in humans.
To see if the editing had affected all cells, they inserted a single gene taken from a sea anemone. It makes the cells glow under ultraviolet light under a microscope.
As a side effect, however, these two beagles, named Tiangou and Hercules, glow green even as adults when they are illuminated with a UV lamp. In addition, they are slightly more muscular than regular beagles.
In the past, a sea anemone dog has been created in Korea, whose paws glow red when the dog receives antibiotics. Wouldn’t it be really convenient if your dog also started to blink in the dark when it has a toilet emergency?
For everything however, science cannot. For example, a dog won’t grow wings, even if you add genes taken from a bird.