Biologist Yin Zhi felt like a proud new father when bright green, genetically-engineered piglets were born at his university.

This might sound like some complex prank but it is real science for a real reason. Yin Zhi, second-in-command of a research team at the Northeast Agricultural University had spent three days in a freezing stable waiting for the sow to deliver, so excited he could hardly sleep.

He said, ‘I don’t have kids, but it must be like becoming a dad for the first time. It was the fruit of two years of work.’ He was describing his feelings when the piglets turned out to be fluorescent green like their mother.

Yin’s university is located in China’s far northeastern city of Harbin and makes news in genetic engineering.

Fame first came a year ago when the sow was born fluorescent green all over, even her tongue.

Her offspring, the newly-born piglets, only show patches of green when held up against ultraviolet light, but to the scientists they are more interesting because this is a trait passed on from one generation to the next.

Yin Zhui said, ‘We plan to match them with florescent piglets from another batch of piglets we expect soon. That way, the third generation may be more fluorescent.’
I has been done before but replicating previous experiments is an important step on the road to real innovation.

The researchers manipulated just one gene to make the pigs fluorescent, and there are 20,000 others genes to move on to.

Liu Zhonghua, said, ‘Research into pigs is important because they are vessels for the generation of organs. For the foreseeable future, it will not be possible to breed organs outside living bodies, and we need to use pigs’ bodies for this purpose.’

China is rapidly increasing its spending on research and development, with funding growing by an annual average annual of 18% over the past five years, according to Science, a US journal.

By contrast, the United States, Japan and the European Union have seen annual average growth of 2.9% in the same period, the journal said. Note that Yan Shi’s pigs are real. Our illustration is fake.
Source: IOL