Yes! You have read the title correctly. It is being claimed that South Korean scientists have successfully cloned four dogs that can glow red in the dark. This if actually, possibly true can have major implications in medical science. The four cloned beagles look perfectly alright in daylight but several body parts glow red in the dark including the nails, skin, eyes and abdomen. The entire body glows under ultraviolet light. This is because of a gene which produces a protein that glows. This is how it was done.

It involved taking canine fibroblast cells and injecting them with a virus which inserted the fluorescent gene into the nucleus. This nucleus was then put into an egg from another dog with this cell used in an implanted embryo. The mother gave birth to six puppies of which four survived and all of them glowed. Amazingly this took place way back in December 2007 and was only recently publicized. The project was led by Lee Byeong-chun, a professor at Seoul National University. There can be suspicion over these claims as he was known to be an assistant to Hwang Woo-suk who was found to have faked data in the past. The key achievement is the transplantation of a gene with a particular trait. In principle at least, it should be possible to insert genes related to human diseases into cloned dogs. This will make it much easier to use animals to research the effects of, and cures for, genetic conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.

[Geeksaresexy]