The lab-born primate, developed by Chinese scientists, made history as the world’s first live-born “chimeric” monkey. And: he glowed! Green!
The lab-born primate, developed by Chinese scientists, made history as the world’s first live-born “chimeric” monkey. And: he glowed! Green!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A chimera, as the report explains, is an animal with more than two sets of DNA; in this case, the long-tailed macaque was created by combining two genetically distinct embryos of the same species.
As the Independent notes, scientists often use chimeric mice and rats in lab settings as a means of studying embryonic development, as well as examining disease progression in living organs and tissues.
“Mice don’t reproduce many aspects of human disease for their physiology being too different from ours,” senior study author Zhen Liu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN.
As ScienceAlert notes, in past attempts to create chimeric primates, the donor DNA was deeply underrepresented in the offspring’s body tissues.
As study coauthor Miguel Esteban, principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN, this finding suggests that chimeric macaques could one day be useful for “modeling neurodegenerative diseases.”
When the scientists combined the embryos, they added a green fluorescent protein to the donor cells — that way, they could more easily track where some of that DNA was disseminating.
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