Glowing bunny rabbits aren’t just for Sherlock Holmes reboots and acid trips anymore. Scientists from the University of Hawaii recently collaborated with a team from Istanbul, Turkey, where a couple of bright green lab rabbits were just born as part of a larger effort to better understand hereditary illness and make cheaper medicine. Also: Glow-in-the-dark bunnies!
This isn’t some inhumane magic trick. The rabbits are part of a genetic manipulation experiment, one that the researchers hope will shed some light on hereditary diseases and hopefully lead the way to producing drugs to help cure them. The embryos of the two green rabbits were injected with a fluorescent protein from jellyfish DNA, giving them the “glowing gene” that makes them green under a blacklight. The glowing effect is just to show that the genetic manipulation technique works, and in future experiments, researchers could inject beneficial DNA into the rabbits so that they might be used to produce medicine.
via These Glow in the Dark Rabbits Will Help Cure Diseases One Day.