In brightest day, in blackest night,
No virus shall escape my sight
Let those who worship infections' might,
Beware my power... Green JellyCat's light!
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
A strain of glowing green cats developed by scientists and resistant to the feline version of HIV is assisting researchers in developing gene therapy that would help humans block the disease...
The study, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Methods, involved inserting monkey genes that block the virus into feline eggs, or oocytes, before they are fertilised.
Why glowing green? Why jellyfish genes?
The scientists also inserted jellyfish genes that make the modified cells glow an eerie green colour - making the altered genes easy to spot. Tests on cells taken from the cats show they are resistant to feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV, which causes Aids in cats.
"This provides the unprecedented capability to study the effects of giving Aids-protection genes into an Aids-vulnerable animal," Dr. Eric Poeschla of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
And to make the whole thing even cooler (or spookier, depending on your point of view)
The team has mated two of the three original green-glowing cats, which have produced litters totalling eight kittens which make glowing cells as well.
As usual, it's a long way between any one development (even turning cats green) and a cure for anything, let alone the almost intractable AIDS virus. But it is almost certain that science will eventually figure it out -- we just don't know yet which research path(s) will be successful.
Or at least Michele Bachmann has not informed us yet which path her God has told her is the one to defund, lest a cure be found.