World's First Transgenic Dog-Flourescent 'Ruppy'

Researchers at Seoul National University in South Korea have created the world's first transgenic dog.

Cloned beagle named Ruppy - short for Ruby Puppy - and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.

The research team led by Byeong-Chun Lee created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones, reports New Scientist.

Team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington said: "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model."

Scientists created Ruppy by first infecting dog fibroblast cells with a virus that inserted the fluorescent gene into a cell's nucleus. They then transferred the fibroblast's nucleus to another dog's egg cell, with its nucleus removed.

After a week dividing in a Petri dish, researchers implanted the cloned embryo into a surrogate mother. Starting with 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, Lee's team ended up with seven pregnancies. One fetus died about half way through term, while an 11-week-old puppy died of pneumonia after its mother accidentally bit its chest.

Five dogs are alive, healthy and starting to spawn their own fluorescent puppies, Ko says.

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For researchers the challenge to create transgenic dogs is controlling where in the nuclear DNA a foreign gene lands.

To solve this problem, Lee's team used a retrovirus to transfer the fluorescent gene to dog fibroblast cells, but they could not control where the virus inserted the gene.

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This would seem to prevent researchers from making dog "knockouts" lacking a specific gene or engineering dogs that produce mutant forms of a gene.

The study has been published in the journal genesis.

Source-ANI
THK