You can actually make goats that produce the spider silk proteins. Just like "hands in the air! My hands are green." For example, they do that already with the genes that make proteins involved in spider silk. So, you could put in something that made someone glow under UV light, this green fluorescent protein from jellyfish, which would be so cool in a night clubs. So, you could do one thing that would be down to one particular protein or a couple of proteins. So, one gene is not responsible for super accurate sight or the smelling ability of dogs, or the hearing ability of foxes or something like that.Ĭhris - It can make a person glow with a glowing green jellyfish gene, couldn't you? That would be good. The difficulty comes when you say, if you put certain genes into different species, would it give that species some new power? So for example say, if you put an olfactory receptor, something involved in smelling from a dog into a human, would a human be able to suddenly smell all these different things? The answer is probably no because one gene doesn't just give a big characteristic like that. They make little recipes that cells use to make different proteins. That means it will be active and it will make a protein because that's what genes do. If you put a gene in that's kind of got the right bits and bobs, it will be expressed. It's all the same kind of nuts and bolts. In the lab, you can put jellyfish genes into mice, you can put human genes into bacteria, you can put worm genes into yeast. Kat - Technically, it's completely possible because DNA is just DNA.
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