Gene transfer using HIV - 2nd article GMO series

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By using an innocuous virus derived from HIV, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have developed a new way of giving animals genes from other organisms to produce specific traits.

Termed transgenic animals, they are important to progress in biological research and have a wide range of potential benefits in human health, agriculture, and many other fields.

Body parts of mouse glows when seen under fluorescent light demonstrating that the animal's body cells contain a gene from a jellyfish. Researchers found that the successful transfer of the jellyfish gene to mice made almost all tissues of the animal fluorescent.

Animals that have been "engineered" to acquire certain medical conditions, for example, serve as good surrogates for studying human diseases and testing potential treatments and cures. In the future, cows might be given genes that enable them to produce milk containing therapeutic human proteins, or there may be transgenic chickens that can produce eggs low in cholesterol.
Since the first transgenic animal, a mouse, was created more than two decades ago, different methods of development have been tried, but met with mixed success. The new method announced by the researchers at Caltech has some advantages over other techniques.
Today, transgenic animals are generally created by injecting "foreign" genes into the nucleus of animal cells—a procedure that is costly and requires a high degree of precision and expertise. The new technique entails using a powerful virus, much like the one that causes AIDS, to deliver the genes into the cells and insert them into an animal's genome.
"It's surprising how well it works," said David Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who led the research team. "This technique is much easier and more efficient than the procedure now commonly in use, and the results suggest that it can be used to generate other transgenic animal species.

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