Engineering Ancient Genes - What Could Go Wrong - Science

This one I'm sure you will love since it plays to a zillion bad sci fi movies about the monsters coming to eat us all.  (Science Daily:  Scientists engineer animals with ancient genes to test causes of evolution)

Transgenic fruitfly engineered to carry the alcohol dehydrogenase gene as it existed about 4 million years ago. Thousands of these “ancestralized” flies were bred and studied for their ability to metabolize alcohol and to survive on an alcohol-rich food source.

Credit: Kathleen Gordon

- Science Daily

Likely all the sibs remember the process in which you knock out the fruitflies with some ether to shake them out over a slide to look at them through a microscope.  Counting their scutellar bristles on the fruitfly's back was a big, big favorite with geneticists but their interests have diversified somewhat since then. 

Take a moment and I bet you can smell the ether in that lab all over again.

"One of the major goals of modern evolutionary biology is to identify the genes that caused species to adapt to new environments, but it's been hard to do that directly, because we've had no way to test the effects of ancient genes on animal biology," said Mo Siddiq, a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the study's lead scientists.

"We realized we could overcome this problem by combining two recently developed methods -- statistical reconstruction of ancient gene sequences and engineering of transgenic animals," he said.

- Science Daily

No chance you're hearing "Jurassic Park" behind that, right?

There is clear value to evolutionary genetics in the study and you will need to read the article for the background but the purpose of the research was to validate a long-held presumption about the effect of a particular gene in these flies.  Their research shot that assumption all to hell.

Working with collaborators David Loehlin at the University of Wisconsin and Kristi Montooth at the University of Nebraska, Siddiq then created and characterized transgenic flies containing the reconstructed ancestral forms of Adh.  They bred thousands of these "ancestralized" flies, tested how quickly they could break down alcohol, and how well the larvae and adult flies survived when raised on food with high alcohol content.  Surprisingly, the transgenic flies carrying the more recent Adh were no better at metabolizing alcohol than flies carrying the more ancient form of Adh.  Even more strikingly, they were no better able to grow or survive on increasing alcohol concentrations.  Thus, none of the predictions of the classic version of the story were fulfilled.  There is no doubt that D. melanogaster did adapt to high-alcohol food sources during its evolution, but not because of changes in the Adh enzyme.

- Science Daily

Drosophila melanogaster is the science name for this type of fruitfly and that name is burned so deep into my head after hearing it so much from my ol' Dad.  There's no particular ethical question in breeding as many of them as you need for your research since no-one will get bent when you whack them at the end of the program.

We don't usually hear much about PETA or the like protesting about mice and the same thing generally applies but it's really revolting.  Imagine a four-foot cube as the box to hold the deader mice and that damn thing was full of them with their last nervous jerks so the whole thing seemed to writhe.

Just as a helpful reminder of the process, you take that little rodent's tail and then whack his head against the table.  Presto, dead mouse.

Ed:  would you say this put you off a career in Biology?

Good chance, matey mate.

It didn't reduce the interest in marine biology but if anything gets whacked from that it will probably be me.

We don't want to get overly nostalgic about deader mice since the concept of engineering ancient genes to resurrect them is obviously dangerous ground.  In the case of fruitflies or mice, they're not likely to get out of the lab but the sci fi story starts when they do.