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THIS week sees the announcement of a significant advance in the science of cloning animals. Until now, the commercial possibilities of such cloning have been limited and controversial. Dolly the sheep has proved difficult to replicate, and Genetic Savings and Clone (GSC), a Californian firm that plans to offer a cloning service to distraught dog-owners whose pooches have snuffed it, is not exactly aiming for the mass market: it plans to charge $250,000 a shot.
GSC has, however, got one thing right. It is in retailing clones that the big money is likely to be made. Which is where GeneDupe, a firm based in San Melito, California, comes in. GeneDupe thinks it has identified a retail market for cloned animals that will be lucrative, simple to service, and unlikely to stir up too much moral outrage: pet fish.
Fish are well suited to being the world’s first mass-marketed animal clones because, after the white mouse and the fruit fly, the zebra fish—a thumb-nail-sized tropical species—is one of the animals most studied by geneticists and embryologists. A lot is thus known about how fish develop. That is just as well. For it is not merely the cloning of existing varieties (an easy trick that requires only the division of early-stage embryos into their constituent cells) that GeneDupe plans. The big money, the company hopes, will come from “tweaking” fish genes to create new, previously unimagined strains.
The firm’s first product is a goldfish that is genuinely gold, not the shade of orange that currently passes for that colour in ichthyological circles. To create this animal required two things. The first was the introduction of a gene for a genetically modified version of haemoglobin which Paolo Fril, GeneDupe’s boss, has dubbed haemaurin. The second was the introduction of a gene for a synthetic enzyme that he calls aurinase.
Unlike haemoglobin, which has an atom of iron at its centre, haemaurin contains an atom of gold. The haemaurin circulates in the fish’s blood until it reaches the skin. There, it is degraded by the aurinase, and metallic gold is deposited in the animal’s pigment cells. (This also opens up a lucrative sideline for GeneDupe, since its so-called RealGold fish must be fed with a special fish food that contains traces of the metal.)
RealGold fish will be released on to the market on April 1st. But they represent only the first of Dr Fril’s ideas. He and his research team are in the final stages of developing a PlatinumFish, for those who think that gold is a little downmarket, and they soon expect to be able to match any metallic shade that a fish-fancier fancies (though this service will be significantly more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf colour).
The pièce de résistance of the range, however, is a little genetic joke. Embryologists in the past spent a lot of time worrying about something they called the French flag problem. This was how simple chemical gradients in an embryo could result in complex body patterns. Their idealised version of this question was to ask how two signal chemicals, starting from opposite ends of an embryo, could result in a pattern that looked like the French flag (ie, three different coloured vertical stripes). The French flag problem was solved by the discovery of so-called “hox” genes that control embryonic development, and much of the early hox work was done in zebra fish. Dr Fril has used this knowledge to create a FrenchFlag fish, with a blue head, a white body and a red tail, and hopes to follow it soon with one depicting the stars and stripes. As a wag once put it “one man’s fish is another man’s poisson.”
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