GLOW IN THE BARK BEAGLE

from the New York Post

By RITA DELFINER

Meet Ruppy, the glow-in-the-dark puppy.

The cloned beagle -- her full name is Ruby Puppy -- and four other pups glow because they have genetic information from sea anemones, a breakthrough scientists hope will help in the study of human diseases.

The pups produce a protein that glows under ultraviolet light, New Scientist magazine reported yesterday.

Researchers created the first transgenic dog -- so-called because it has genes transferred from another species -- by cloning and inserting cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Scientists hope it will lead to transgenic dog models of human diseases, the magazine quoted one of the team members, CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, as saying.
"The next step for us is to generate a true disease model," he said.

The team that created Ruppy was led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea, who with stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang was part of the scientific effort that in 2005 created Snuppy, the first cloned dog.

Greg Barsh, a Stanford University geneticist who studies dogs as models of disease, called it an "important accomplishment," according to the magazine.
But Nathan Sutter, a geneticist at Cornell University whose specialty is dogs, said "transgenesis is laborious, expensive and slow."

When the cost of tending to the animals and negative public impressions are factored in, few researchers might consider transgenic dogs, the magazine quoted him as saying. "It's not on my horizon as a dog geneticist at all."