I was welcomed this morning to an interesting link (thanks Mykal!) about scientists in South Korea that have decided to clone cats AND also throw in a very odd twist, they have made them glow in the dark!
When I saw the images my first thought was, "Woot! I can't wait to get one of my own". It would be awesome to show off my glow in the dark cat to everyone!
I haven't read up enough on cloned animals, but does this mean that I can cross breed a glow in the dark cat with a standard house cat and then have some interesting hybrids running around my house? The possibilities might be endless... but, would these hybrids need to be charged in the light in order to make them glow in the dark or do they automatically glow once the lights are out?
The cats that the scientists cloned glow under fluorescent lights which definitely means I will have to buy some more black lights for my room. ;) I was intrigued by what the scientists had to do just to make this possible.
I am going to add this to the strange scientific creations list... This glowing cats story made my day.Here's what the researchers say they did: They took skin cells from Turkish Angora female cats and used a virus to insert the genetic instructions for making red fluorescent protein. Then they put the gene-altered nuclei into eggs for cloning. The cloned embryos were implanted back into the donor cats, which effectively became the surrogate mothers for their own clones.
Four kittens were born by Caesarian section, but one of them died during the procedure, according to the Korea Times. The fact that the kittens' skin cells glowed under ultraviolet light served as evidence that they were really gene-altered clones.
