Thursday, September 24, 2009

Color blindness within monkeys

Scientists have always been curious about the cure to color blindness and with their latest experiment they may be one step closer to its discovery. It is said, that two male Squirrel monkeys who were once color blind can now see in full color due to gene therapy. This therapy is believed to eventually cure human color blindness. For this experiment monkeys, Dalton and Sam were injected with a virus whose disease-causing genes had been replaced with human genes for red photo pigments. Viruses dump their genes into host cells, where the rival DNA can replicate. In this case, the virus was used to insert photo pigment genes. Since monkey's brains are similar to ours, researchers hoped the same result could work on humans as well. The monkeys were used as the test subjects mainly because they are adult male Squirrel monkeys that were red-green color blind since birth and also because all males in the species show signs of red-green color blindness, which is also the most common form of color blindness in humans.Luckily, 5 months after injecting human genes in the monkey's eyes, they began to see red. This is known because the monkeys were tested daily. Their tests were basically that they had to distinguish patches of colored dots that were varied in size and brightness from surrounding grey dots on a screen. Both monkeys passed and are now cured from their blindness. :)

1 comment:

penguinperson said...

Wow that is interesting. I didn't know that monkeys could have color blindness.