Transgenic Songbirds Provide New Tool To Understanding Language and The Brain (via ScienceDaily)
You can learn a lot from an animal. By manipulating the DNA of mice, flies, frogs and worms, scientists have discovered a great deal about the genes and molecules behind many of life’s essential processes. These basic functions often work about the same in people as they do in “model” animals. But if you want to study more sophisticated cognitive processes such as humans’ ability to learn language from one another, you need a more sophisticated organism. For the first time, researchers have devised a way to alter the genes of the zebra finch, one of a handful of social animals that learn to “speak” by imitating their fellows….
Genetic Engineering to Cure Color Blindness
Scientists say they are a step closer to curing colour blindness using gene therapy. A US team were able to restore full colour vision to adult monkeys born without the ability to distinguish between the colours red and green….
Until now scientists had not thought it was possible to manipulate the adult brain in this way. It was considered that adding new sensory information, such as the visual receptors necessary for perfect colour vision, could only be done in the earliest years of life when the brain is at its most malleable or “plastic”.
But Professor Jay Neitz and his team were able to introduce therapeutic genes into the light-sensing cells at the back of the eye of adult male squirrel monkeys.
The therapeutic genes contained the necessary DNA code to enable the light-sensing cells to distinguish between red and green - something lacking in the male monkeys. Tests revealed the gene therapy was a success. The male monkeys now possessed the necessary photopigments to see all colours and were able to correctly pick out red from green on computer image tests. The monkeys were treated over two years ago and their improvement in colour vision has remained stable since…. (more @ BBC News)
DNA computer solves logic queries
Strands of DNA are designed to give off a green light corresponding to “yes”. The system devised by the researchers uses molecules to represent facts and rules. In this way, the team was able to use it to answer simple molecular “questions”….
First, they tried the system with simple “if… then…” propositions. One of these went as follows: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” When fed a molecular rule (all men are mortal) and a molecular fact (Socrates is a man), the DNA computing system was able to answer the question “Is Socrates mortal?” correctly.
The answer was encoded in a flash of green light. Some of the DNA strands were equipped with a naturally glowing fluorescent molecule bound to a second molecule which keeps the light covered. A specialised enzyme, attracted to the part of the molecule representing the correct answer, would then remove this cover to let the light shine…. (more @ ScienceDaily)
Glowing Monkeys (via BBC News)
Scientists have created genetically modified primates that glow green when exposed to ultraviolet light. The “transgenic” marmosets, created by a Japanese team, are the first to pass on the modification to their children.
Future genetic modifications to primates could aid efforts to cure such diseases as Parkinson’s.
However, the results, published in Nature, raise a number of ethical questions about deliberately exposing a bloodline of animals to such diseases.
Scientists have managed to modify the genes of many living organisms in recent years, ranging from bacteria to mice. Mice have been particularly useful experimental models for studying a wide range of human diseases as modified genes are passed on from parents to progeny. However, mice are not useful for some human diseases because they are not sufficiently similar to produce effects that are meaningful to human disease. Studies of mice with Alzheimer’s disease, for example, were stymied simply because their brains were too small to scan at sufficient resolution.
Now, Erika Sasaki of the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan, and her colleagues, have introduced a gene into marmoset embryos that allows them to build green fluorescent protein (GFP) in their tissues. The protein is so-called because it glows green under ultraviolet light in a process known as fluorescence. The protein has become a standard in biology and genetic engineering, and its discovery even warranted a Nobel prize.
