This really has nothing to do with making your pet cat fluorescent so that you can see it in the dark and not stand on it when you get up to go the toilet at night. It has, however, everything to do with the similarities between human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV).

Researchers at Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit medical practice and medical research group based in the US, have created three genetically engineered kittens that can glow green and pass this gene onto their offspring.

The obvious question is why?

Eric Poeschla, a molecular biologist and infectious disease specialist at Mayo:

FIV causes AIDS [in cats] with loss of infection-fighting T cells like HIV does in people, and cats get sick from virtually the same AIDS-defining opportunistic infections as humans who have untreated HIV.

So, when scientists insert the weird combination of Rhesus macaque monkey genes and jellyfish genes into unfertilised cat eggs, the cats that result post-fertilisation are resistant to FIV.

The Rhesus macaque is well known to science and has been used extensively in medical and biological research on human and animal health-related diseases like HIV.

Essentially researchers wanted to genetically experiment more with cats to better understand how to combat AIDS because, as Poeschla continues:

We want[ed] to see if we can protect the domestic cat against its AIDS virus, [so] we can protect any species, eventually including ours, against its own AIDS virus.

He continued that future experiments will look to introduce protective genes into people that can help them fight off HIV.

And why the glow-in-the-dark thing? Basically so that the researchers can accurately track which cats pass on the protective genes – thank you jellyfish gene that glows fluorescent green under special lights. Apparently this doesn’t harm the cats either.

The thing is, we are just used to hearing about these kinds of experiments being performed on animals like mice and monkeys, but, cats are actually a lot more similar to humans than we’d like to admit.

Poeschla explains:

Some feline organs, such as the eye, are much more similar to humans than the same organs in mice. The cat brain, particularly the cerebral cortex and vision-processing parts, is the best understood of any species.

[So cats] might be of help in understanding the workings of the brain and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or with genetic illnesses and major eye diseases such as glaucoma or macular degeneration.

Science is rad.

[Source: LiveScience]