A nice workaround to all this fish engineering hassle might be to take advantage of the fact that cyanobacteria can apparently live symbiotically inside zebra fish tissues without too much trouble! Look at this lovely work by Pam Silver's group:
An Injection of Symbiotic Cyanobacteria Gives Fish the Power of Photosynthesis (Sort Of)
Towards a Synthetic Chloroplast
So now the problem has been reduced to engineering bioluminescent cyanobacteria (entirely feasible, and a really cool project I think!), and then injecting those cyanobacteria inside fish embryos...
Patrik
On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:54:58 PM UTC-7, Patrik D'haeseleer wrote:
Keep in mind that the luciferin biosynthesis pathway for firefly is not known yet, so if you use the firefly luciferase, you'll have to keep your goldfish swimming in an aquarium of expensive purchased firefly luciferin...--
The bacterial bioluminescence pathways are fully known, which is why most people are focusing on those. Now you're dealing with 5-6 genes that you all have to express in approximately the right ratios and locations. Chances are engineering a bioluminescent goldfish would be equally or more difficult as engineering a bioluminescent plant - at least with a plant, you can target the chloroplasts, which are essentially mini bacterial organelles.
If you would like to go that route, your best approach would be to try replicate the GFP goldfish first. At least you only need to express a single gene for that.
There's also a big hurdle in getting the genes into the germ line. Sure, you could engineer single fish cells, but there's a big distance from having a single engineered cell to having a live fish that expresses the bioluminescence pathway.
Patrik
On Thursday, September 8, 2011 6:21:45 AM UTC-7, V.Hilversum wrote:Could it be possible to influence a fish to produce photoproteins in
it's chromatophores?
My original idea was to use goldfish, but I've been looking at
zebrafish because they are easy to care for and are well documented
scientifically. I also found biobricks for the clemicals used by
fireflies, although they are tuned for use in E. Coli. How difficult
would it be to get those to work in a zebrafish?
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