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Glowing Pig Passes Genes to Piglets

 

A researcher holds up two piglets born from a cloned pig under ultraviolet light

to show the fluorescent green glow from their snout, trotters, and tongue at the

Harbin Sanyuan Animal Husbandry Industrial Company, a subsidiary institute of

the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin, northeastern China'

Heilongjiang province, Monday, Jan 7, 2008. By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN (Associated

Press Writer)

From Associated Press

January 09, 2008 2:52 PM EST

BEIJING - 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 cloned cats

that glow red when exposed to ultraviolet rays.

 

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Associated Press Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

 

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Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

Confucius