About ten people wrote me privately, as almost everyone does nowadays on
these sorts of subjects, and asked a variety of questions about the glowing
green bunny and monkey.

While I was kidding around in my first posting, let me answer the general
tone of all of the questions that I was asked and say that the insertion of
these transspecific genes is being done merely as the first steps in
understanding the roles and nature of the various genes that comprise a
species' genome ("genome" = the entirety of all of the code that an
individual carries in its cells). While we are just now in the process of
mapping out all of the genes in a species' genome, we understand only much
more primitively what functions the vast majority of these genes code for.

The use of flourescent tags has had a long history in biochemistry. Like any
other form of endevour, if you can figure out any way to make what you're
studying visible, understanding comes enormously more quickly. You can get a
sense of the nature of these sorts of studies from the following web pages.
The use of a flourescing protein is not being done as a lark:

    A flourescent mosquito:
        http://www.ucr.edu/SubPages/2CurNewsFold/Magazine/Jan99/briefs.html

    Flourescent plant viruses:
        http://www.orst.edu/dept/cgrb/faculty/dolja/

However, the jellyfish gene is not the only marker being used. A brief review
of some of the markers and the controversy about their use, particularly in
released crop plants, can be seen at:

     http://www.agbios.com/articles/2000186-A.htm

Further, it's important to understand that there is a hit-and-miss quality to
these experiments. Flourescing organisms are not rare in nature. They exist
in a variety of plankton, a large variety of deep-sea fish, and a few
arthropods, such as fireflies. I truly don't know whether or not Alba the
rabbit actually flouresces or not under blacklight stimulation, but it is
more than plausible that she could.

However, it is being reported that ANDi ("inserted DNA" spelled backwards),
the monkey, does not, even at the cellular level. There can be a number of
reasons for that failure to flouresce. The jellyfish gene may not be being
transcribed (copied from ANDi's DNA and converted into messenger RNA so that
that information will migrate out of the cell's nucleus into the cytosol,
where it can be read and used as a template for protein manufacture), or it
may not be being translated into protein simply because critical aspect of
the process is malfunctioning. But I understand that the gene is verifiably
present in ANDi's DNA, even if it is not being expressed.

As you might guess, if there were great value in a species flourescing in the
wild, then the biochemical processes that promote that flourescence are
likely to be highly optimized and quite efficiently done. Randomly inserting
a gene from a distant species (such as a jellyfish gene into a virus, a worm,
a fly, a rabbit or a monkey) is not nearly as likely to work with the same
level of efficiency, or perhaps at all.

But if you can get it to work, and you can tightly mechanically link it to a
gene for which you are interested in understanding its function, then you
have a very straightforward mechanism to see where and when that gene is
likely to be engaged, and what processes it is participating in.

The process is basically no different than you trying to understand an
operating system you didn't design -- and have no operating instructions on
-- by designing specific probes and breakpoints to simply explore that
operating system, very small step by very small step.

Wirt Atmar