Five small monkeys that glow green under ultraviolet light are providing a beacon for medical research. Researchers introduced a jellyfish gene that codes for a fluorescent protein into the embryos of marmosets, and found that the resulting monkeys expressed the gene in all the cells of their body, including their egg and sperm cells--which means the genetically engineered primates can naturally pass on the foreign trait to their offspring. While creating a family of glowing monkeys doesn't have obvious benefits for medical science, researchers say the study was really just a proof of concept.
Researchers have added genes to rhesus macaques before, but the new work with marmosets is the first to document that monkeys can pass an inserted gene along to future generations. That's important because it opens the door to creating colonies of such "transgenic" monkeys by breeding, which would be far simpler than the cumbersome process of ...
