GLOW PIGS! WOW here we go again omg. With vid.
BEIJING (AP) - A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported.
The glowing piglets’ birth proves transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, according to Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program at Northeast Agricultural University.
“Continued development of this technology can be applied to … the production of special pigs for the production of human organs for transplant,” Liu said in a news release posted Tuesday on the university’s Web site.
Calls to the university seeking comment Wednesday were not answered.
The piglets’ mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein. Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, the university said.
Robin Lovell-Badge, a genetics expert at Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research, said the technology “to genetically manipulate pigs in this way would be very valuable.”
Lovell-Badge had not seen the research from China’s cloned pigs and could not comment on its credibility. He said, however, that organs from genetically altered pigs would potentially solve some of the problems of rejected organs in transplant operations.
He said the presence of the green protein would allow genetically modified cells to be tracked if they were transplanted into a human. The fact that the pig’s offspring also appeared to have the green genes would indicate that the genetic modification had successfully penetrated every cell, Lovell-Badge added.
But he said much more research and further trials—both in animals and in humans—would be necessary before the benefits of the technology could be seen.
Other genetically modified pigs have been created before, including by Scotland’s Roslin Institute, but few results have been published.
Tokyo’s Meiji University last year successfully cloned a transgenic pig that carries the genes for human diabetes, while South Korean scientists
you know there were glow cats, now glow pigs
Here’s a LINK to the follow up story on the glow pigs, detailing the story of the parent glow pigs and how they were created.
Tags: beijing glow pigs, china pigs, chinese glow pigs, glow cat, glow catz, glow pig, glow pigz, glowing pigs, pigs glowing, pigs that glowRelated posts
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How long before people are sued for genetic piracy when their children start glowing?
Would make nightclubbing more interesting, especially if you mix different colours. I wonder about side effects though, especially as this can presumably live on in the wild. Or would natural selection breed any bad side effects out?
Never mind all that, what do they taste like?
I won’t eat anything that glows.
However if people fight over black/white imagine the fights over blue/green/red.
I wonder if you could do something cool like how chameleons change colors to hide, you could adjust the glowing due to excitement/anger. That way I can avoid my boss if he is glowing red.
Sinner6: that would come in super handy when trying to pick up chicks too!
hognoxious: I imagine it tastes like ham, but green. Please refer to Dr. Seuss for the best answer.
i think glowing creatures are the future of mankind. soon we will be able to find our way through the night, without light, but skin glow, and give off signals like fireflys to our mates,
PS-this is a bunch of shit. these scientists get paid to fuck around with mother nature, and they are wacking it while we sit around with real jobs.
make a glow elephant fucks
[...] has to bee the coolest thing ever: a cloned pig has had its genes altered to make it glow fluorescently green! And the fun doesn’t stop there - the manipulated pig has [...]
I’m no vegetarian but if I eat glow in the dark meat will I glow in the dark. Sad that we have to experiment on defenseless animals for what purpose? So that my next generation of kids can have green eyes, 20/20 vision, and a large ____. Ego
All joking aside while very cool and fascinating, we have bigger problems in this world (global warming) I don’t think the green pig can help.