cloning pets and other animals
sporte | November 6, 2008What kind of dead animals are in your freezer? I used to be skeptical about the whole notion of cloning wooly mammoths. But this recent article in PNAS (1), makes the whole idea seem less far fetched.
Wakayamaa et. al. describe an amazing technical advance where scientists in Japan were able to derive clones from mice that had been frozen for 16 years at -20°C.
I'm guessing that this wasn't one of the freezers with an automatic defrost cycle.
Sure, this demonstration is still a long way from cloning an elephant or related species. Even cat and dog cloning are fairly recent advances…
sporte | October 23, 2008This video from WDSU shows Mr. Green Genes, the transgenic kitty, in the dark and in the light.
There's also an interview with Dr. Betsy Dresser, who very briefly talks about the work at the Audubon Center for Research on Endangered Species.
Other than clips of the cat, and Dr. Dresser, the video mostly shows people taking frozen samples out of liquid nitrogen, but there's an interesting bit towards the end where they show a pipette transferring material into the nucleus of an egg cell. Mr. Green Genes is certainly a cute cat.
You can see more pictures from the Times Picayune: here and…
sporte | October 22, 2008I've heard that all cats are grey in the dark, but I guess that's no longer true in New Orleans. Scientists at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species have made a cloned kitty that glows lime green.
Some of you already know my fascination with glowing fish, fluorescent cats, and cloned puppies. This New Orleans cat is interesting too, partly, because it's the first transgenic cat made in this country, and partly because of the work that ACRES has been doing to try and rescue endangered species.
ACRES has made the headlines before. Dr. C. Earle Pope and Dr. Martha Gomez,…
sporte | August 10, 2008It justs gets weirder and weirder.
moar funny pictures
You can find more of the story and more puppy pictures here.
H/T to Jennifer - one of erv's commeters.
sporte | August 7, 2008Leave it to those wacky Korean cloners. In December, scientists from Gyeongsang National University gave us fluorescent kitties. Now, we have cute little puppies!
These aren't the first cloned pets on the market, we have stores that sell glowing fish. But these clones have a bit higher price tag. For $50,000 Bernann McKinney got 5 new "Boogers" from RNL Bio; "Booger McKinney," "Booger Lee," "Booger Ra," "Booger Hong and "Booger Park." That's $10,000 a Booger!
Still, who can resist these cute little boogers? I have a picture of the puppies below the fold and as you can see, they're…
sporte | June 20, 2008
"Let this sleepin' dog lie, son. Dog-gone it, I'm dog tired. I'm tired of leading the dog's life and fightin' likes cats and dogs against cats and dogs, a young pup's doggin' my trail tryin' to become top dog. I'm going to the dogs in a dog eat dog world, son. I... I'm so far over the hill... I'm on the bottom of the other side. "
- Wylie Burp from Fievel Goes West
I don't know why I find these stories about cloning puppies so interesting, but...
Someone sent me a press release on a dog fight between cloning companies.
It turns out that there's a third company, from South Korea, that's…
sporte | June 16, 2008Pet cloning is back!
Pets are funny things. Some owners find their pets to be closer than some human friends, other owners never really bond with their pets at all.
BioArts, a California biotech company, founded by ex-CEO of the now defunct Genetic Savings & Clone, is counting on the strength of those human-dog emotional bonds .
I've had several pets during the course of my life; dogs, cats, fish, scorpions, spiders, frogs, turtles, gerbils, and a hermit crab. Some pets were really easy to train and live with and some - well, let's just say some were more challenging. So, I…
sporte | December 13, 2007Reposted in honor of the "glow in the dark" kitty clones.
Last year, I wrote about photographs of jellyfish that were altered by newspapers, scientific publishers, science education companies, and me (for the purpose of the article) to make it look like the jellyfish glowed.
Those jellyfish do NOT glow. Those images lie or at least misrepresent the truth.
But that doesn't mean that glowing animals don't exist. These pictures were taken under natural light and came from GloFish®.
Normally zebrafish are white with black stripes, but these zebrafish were genetically engineered to…
sporte | December 12, 2007This is a-mewsing.
(Photo Credit: Gyeongsang National University)
When Genetic Savings and Clone shut their doors it looked like wishful cat owners were going to be out of luck and short of kittens.
Never fear, the South Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University have come to the rescue. I couldn't find all the details in the news articles but it appears that they inserted a gene for red fluorescent protein into a somatic cell from a cat, transplanted the cell into an egg cell, put the egg into a female cat's womb and a few weeks later, voila!, lovely white Angora cats that…