Transgenic, Green Monkeys Provide Possibility of Primate Model Organisms

This story is a few months old, but I was reading through the Nature homepage and came across their selected Images of the Year slideshow. Many of these images have to do with various space-related or physics themes, but of particular interest to me when browsing through the images was a gorgeous image of fluorescent green marmoset feet (imaged above).

In May of this past year (happy new year), researchers in Japan (Sasaki et al) successfully injected a self-inactivating lentiviral vector in sucrose solution into marmoset embryos which ended up developing normally. Many of the organs of these marmosets expressed the transgenic information, thus providing proof of concept for the possibility of using marmosets as a non-human primate model organisms. This study will provide a lot of headway into the possibility of having a more direct model for disease research and treatment development that will be more directly applicable to humans.

Take some time and visit the slideshow and appreciate all of the amazing developments in science that highlight this past year. It’s inspiring to think what will come this year.

Read the full publication at Nature: Generation of transgenic non-human primates with germline transmission

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