Scientists have been working in transgenics for some time now in a variety of attempts to enhance one species with the features and abilities of another. The most recent such effort ended in success when two glowing bunnies were born this month in a Turkish lab.
"These rabbits are like a light bulb glowing, like an LED light all over their body,” biogenesis researcher Dr. Stefan Moisyadi told Hawaii local news channel KHON. “And on top of it, their fur is beginning to grow and the greenness is shining right through their fur. It’s so intense."
They produced these bunnies by injecting jellyfish genomes into rabbit DNA. The cute little white rabbits look normal in daylight but glow fluorescent green under an ultraviolent light.
The goal in all such livestock experiments is to produce human benefits via more and tastier meat to feed an ever growing human population, create vitamin and nutrient rich dairy products and even human breast milk in animals to feed starving children, and to create new medicines to treat whatever ails mankind, among other purposes. In the case of these rabbits, the goal is to eventually repeat the success in larger livestock, namely cattle and sheep, in order to produce proteins needed for new drug production.
"Animals can make valuable proteins in their milk that humans use for medicine, and you can extract the proteins quite easily," Stefan Moisyadi, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii Manoa who worked with the Turkish team told the LA Times. "It would make certain pharmaceutical production extremely cost-effective."
"The green is not important at all – it's just a marker to show the experiment can be done successfully," Moisyadi told The Guardian. "The final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build, and be able to produce their own protein-based medication in animals."
The cute little bunnies do not suffer in any way from their newfound glowing abilities. They are expected to live a normal rabbit life and a full lifespan.
To learn more details about glowing bunnies and previous experiments with other animals including monkeys and cats, read the article in MIT Technology Review.
Check out this video by Reuters news service to see the cute little bunnies and learn more about this work.
In case you were wondering, there are no plans to produce glowing pets. The work is intended only to produce specific human benefits and not to induce or indulge fashion trends in animals.