Thread: Mutation in Animals

Many news has been saying that there could be a mutation that caused a dog Wendy the Whippet have stron muscles and very big also. This dog is also called the Hulk Dog. Is it possible that there cuold be a chemical that we could inject into the embryo so we could make more dogs muscular and so more strong. And after that could we make the same for Humans?????

http://animal.discovery.com/videos/m...e-whippet.html

See the above Video!!

I did see this and it is very interesting, I think science can do a lot to genetics and hormones. I do think this is a little fishy though, I can't believe that the side effects are positive with this.

Well there could be some side-effetcs but it must be that they could be very small also,.. Could it?

These animals suffer from a mutation in some genes responsible for producing myostatin.
Belgian blue cattle are a breed of cows suffering from this as well:


The wikepedia page I linked to above also mentions that some humans have this deficiency, as well as some mice (and it has pictures of a normal and deficient mouse, as well as of their dissection).

The article also discusses potential drugs and the clinical uses it would have.
You would have to use it regularly however, not just once.

My internet connection's pretty dodgy at the minute and I wasn't able to load the video. One of the things I found interesting is the "bully whippet syndrome" tag of the video; I googled this syndrome and there's a brief mention (one sentence) of it on the whippet wikipedia page. I haven't heard of this before so I'm assuming it's unique to whippets. It's not uncommon for pedigree breeds to have a certain associated ailment, e.g., German shepherds notoriously have bad hips (more on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7569064.stm). I wonder if years of selection and in-breeding in whippet strains has made them genetically susceptible to this novel syndrome?

Anyway,

Originally Posted by Mr.Blue

Is it possible that there cuold be a chemical that we could inject into the embryo so we could make more dogs muscular and so more strong. And after that could we make the same for Humans?????

The problem with injecting a mutagenic chemical into an embryo is that the chemical would have no specific mode-of-action, and would randomly mutate DNA at multiple points in the genome, with a very slim chance of producing the one desired mutation, and not causing any other lethal mutations in other genes along the way. However, it is possible (in mice embryos at least), with well-developed techniques, to synthesize or modify a gene in vitro, knockout the gene in the mouse, and insert the new gene. Potentially, if you identified the genes responsible for causing bully whippet syndrome, and the significant mutations required, you could carry out this experiment.

Originally Posted by Mr.Blue

And after that could we make the same for Humans?????

I don't think you'd get the permission, buddy, it sounds a little unethical, I can't imagine you would find parents who would be willing to 'donate' their unborn child, plus there's no telling what drastic effects it could have on the individual's physiology, although studies of animal models would give an idea.

I also doubt it would be simple to induce this condition on a human, but I'm no expert.

Originally Posted by 15uliane

I also doubt it would be simple to induce this condition on a human, but I'm no expert.

Obviously it depends on what you mean by "simple", but I think that there's some significant similarities between the known animals models and the potential for inducing the effect in humans. The fact that the extensive muscle growth phenotype appears to be, quite simply, run into over-drive by a chance mutation in whippets; i'm no expert on mammalian physiology/genetics, but why couldn't this occur in humans? Additionaly, the cattle examples given previously were experiments conducted to improve beef yield, such experiments, to my knowledge, have not been conducted on any other animals as there would be no requirement to do so. How would you ever get funding for such a seemingly pointless experiment?

However, there's no doubt the experimental technicalities involved, as well as ethical barriers to bypass, would be pretty extensive.