Glow-in-the-Dark Puppies Edit
Transgenic Dog Helps Researchers Understand Disease

Ruppy or Ruby Puppy is the world’s first fluorescent glow-in-the-dark puppy. She and four other beagles were grown from cloned embryos which had the red fluorescent gene from sea anemones artificially inserted. This is a proof of concept experiment to produce transgenic dogs which could help researchers understand diseases. The work was done by scientists at Korea’s Seoul University and the University of Kentucky.

Some scientists question, however, whether transgenic dogs will become more widespread because creating and maintaining them is “labourious, expensive and slow.” The current procedure has a low cloning efficiency—only 1.7% of the embryos came to term.