Green-glowing monkeys pass on traits

JAPANESE researchers have genetically engineered monkeys whose hair roots, skin and blood glow green under a special light, and who have passed on their traits to their offspring, the first time this has been achieved in a primate.

They spliced a jellyfish gene into common marmosets, and said they hope to use their colony of glowing animals to study human Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.

Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan used a virus to carry the gene for green fluorescent protein into monkey embryos, which were implanted into a female monkey, and four out of five were born with the gene throughout their bodies.

- Green-glowing monkeys pass on traits, news.com.au

Significant amounts of DNA in modern biological forms show evidence of having been integrated by viral infection. Retroviruses [wikipedia] uses reverse transcriptase [wikipedia] to become retrotransposons [wikipedia], integrating themselves into the DNA of the host organism. These so-called endogenous retroviruses [wikipedia] may play a key role in evolution.

The example of the green-glowing monkeys shows how a virus can integrate new information into the DNA of an existing life form. It doesn't answer questions such as: "What is life?" "Where does life come from?" "Where do all the material elements come from?" "What has determined the physical structure of this universe?" .

However, it does provide a mechanism to answer a question such as: "How can organisms increase in genetic complexity?"

"Cosmic radiation" is not the only, or even primary source of the "random mutation" required by the model of evolution through mutation and natural selection.