Feb 16, 2020
Scientists have discovered how to make glow-in-the-dark cats by inserting the jellyfish genes that create fluorescent proteins into feline eggs.
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.
