09-13-2011, 07:22 PM
timg wrote:
OK, you lost me.
How does making a cat glow in the dark "shed light" on AIDS?
Some humans and some monkeys have an innate immunity to HIV.
Scientists are exploring how that immunity works and how it is passed on to the next generation.
They had demonstrated in lab-tests that certain monkey-genes coded for proteins that disrupted the reproductive cycle of HIV viruses and FIV viruses (the feline version of HIV), but they hadn't previously demonstrated that the monkey-genes would be helpful in a complex organism.
They engineered a cat that had both the monkey-genes and the jellyfish-genes in order to track how the genes were passed to offspring.
The offspring that glow have the new genes. The ones with the new genes will be helpful to HIV/FIV researchers. Now they have a breed of cat that has an immune-response to FIV. They can look at how that works and apply what they learn to the treatment of humans.