Scientists in Turkey have used a new, more effective technique developed at the University of Hawaii to create rabbits whose soft white coats glow green under a black light, the school reports.
The bunnies’ haunting green glow actually comes from jellyfish DNA. Proteins with that marine DNA were injected into a mother rabbit’s embryo in a lab, and two of the eight bunnies born last week in Istanbul carried the genes, according to a UH release.
The ultimate goal, scientists involved with the project say, is to introduce genes in rabbits so their milk will produce medicines that benefit people. So far, the jellyfish gene serves as a "marker" in that goal, UH associate professor Stefan Moisyadi said.
It’s the latest breakthrough touted at UH’s Institute for Biogenesis Research. The institute’s founder, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, cloned the world’s first mouse in 1997 and conducted research that helped lead to in-vitro fertilization in humans.
The glowing-green rabbits themselves aren’t new — they’ve been created before with a slightly different technique, and their images even have been featured in conceptual art installations as conversation starters.
What’s new here are the odds of successfully creating so-called "transgenic" rabbits, Moisyadi said. Using an earlier method, scientists saw about a 5 percent success rate of rendering a glowing bunny, he said.
With Moisyadi’s new technique, which uses plasmids (circular bits of DNA) to introduce the gene into the rabbit cells, the rate increases to about 30 percent, he said.
That greater success rate is important in order to apply the gene-transferring science ("transgenesis") to larger animal species that produce smaller litters, Moisyadi said.
Yanagimachi, now a UH professor emeritus, and Moisyadi traveled to Istanbul in November 2011 to set up the collaboration with the University of Istanbul and Marmara University, according to a UH release. The new transgenic bunnies have been covered by Turkish TV news outlet Cihan.
