Scientists Create Fluorescent Puppy

A team of scientists in South Korea have created the world's first "glowing puppy." Ruppy, which is short for Ruby Puppy, was introduced to the public just this past week. In normal daylight, Ruppy looks like any other dog, but when the ultraviolet lights come out, she is anything but normal. Ruppy, when placed under these special lights, glows red.

Scientists created this weird effect by cloning cells that include the red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones. This makes Ruppy one of only a few successfully created transgenics, meaning she has genes from another animal. The success in the genetics of creating Ruppy gives scientists hope that they will be able to pave the way to model human diseases in dogs, whose relatively long life-span could help to create better study subjects than the typically used ones.

As crazy as it is to see a glowing animal, Ruppy is surprisingly not the first glowing animal made. She is, though, the first glowing canine, along with 4 other beagles created by the scientist, all of whom share this same red glowing trait. The scientist who created Ruppy was also on the team who helped to create the first cloned dog, Snuppy. Such scientist and well accredited stem cell researcher, Woo Suk Hwang, hopes that the cloning and crossing of such genes between animals can show potential hope for increasing life span, disease resistance, and overall health for humans in the future.

Some feel the project of Ruppy was merely an expensive, flashy, pointless experiment, but hopes remain high by the team who feel Ruppy was a small, but necessary step towards stem cell development.

UPDATE 5/1/09: I agree, it is a completely flashy experiment. There was no harm caused to the dogs because it was done early in development. The actual fluorescent coloring causes no harm either. It just went to their paws, they had no predetermined location for it all. I hope it helps with disease development and prevention too!



-Alyssa Terestre