Although Treseder’s lamps derive their glow from the old-fashioned incandescence of lightbulbs, a group of glowing kittens get their shine from a fluorescent tag cribbed from jellyfish DNA. Eric M. Poeschla of the Mayo Clinic and coworkers have developed a technique they call gamete-targeted lentiviral transgenesis, in which an engineered virus inserts exogenous DNA into cat eggs prior to in vitro fertilization (Nat. Meth., DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1703).
Chemical & Engineering News, by Craig Bettenhausen, 11/29/11
Tags: Infectious Diseases