How Was Alba Created?
| French Scientists created Alba through a process called Microinjection. |
| 1.
First of all, let's imagine that the rat above is actually a rabbit.
2. Then we get a fertilized egg in the one cell pronuclear stage. 3. Inject (microinject, hence the name) the male nucleus with wanted gene (which will be named a little later) in the form of linear DNA. 4. We now have an embryo. 5. Several such embryos are introduced into a pseudopregnant "rabbit". 6. Birth - we now have several baby "rabbits" who may not all have the wanted gene. 7. Of these, we get Alba, a white rat. Oops, sorry, a white rabbit that glows under certain conditions. |
| Now that we have looked at the process by which Alba was created, the only element that remains is the mysterious "wanted gene". What is this gene that causes living organisms to glow under certain conditions? |
| This jelly fish is said to be bioluminescent. It contains a fluorescent molecule GFP (green fluorescent protein) which has been extracted, purified, and eventually cloned. Alba was not created with GFP, but with EGFP (Enhanced GFP), which is a synthetic mutation of the original. It is this gene that was microinjected into the embryo form of Alba. The result is an Alba whose fur, under optimum frequency blue light, glows green. |
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