elionande's blog

I needed to check that this was real, and apparently, it is. What’s more, the end goal in these experiments was to fight feline AIDS, creating glow-in-the-dark cats was a side effect. That might be the greatest sentence I write this year.

Ok, so the short version is that scientists want to insert a Useful Gene. But they have no way of knowing if the Useful Gene actually got incorporated into the cat’s (or other animal’s) DNA. So they glue the Glow Gene to the Useful Gene. If the animal glows, both genes got inserted successfully.

Yes! Pretty much every glow in the dark science animal is that way because of the above! A lot of people don’t get that, and think scientists are just screwing around and doing slightly irresponsible things with animal DNA just cuz they can. That’s not the case at all