Chimera

[Guest026]

Is it true that human milk can be made by splicing human and rabbit dna and milking the chimera afterwards?

[insane_alien]

huh? where did you get that idea?

 

you can get human milk with much less effort than that. think 'breast feeding'.

[Guest026]

i read in a book that its possible

[insane_alien]

well, seeing as we haven't created a human/rabbit hybrid before. and are not likely to do so any time soon, we can't really say. i don't know what book you read but it could well have been scifi.

[Martin]

i read in a book that its possible

 

Dear Guest, if the milk came from a human-rabbit chimaera (in the sense of a genetic combo)

then I would be apt to call it, not human milk, but the milk of a genetically modified rabbit.

 

Suppose there is some special chemical factor----like a human-specific hormone---which is found in human milk and not in other milk, and suppose you want an industrial source of that chemical.

 

Then I think it not unlikely that you could transfer a sequence of human DNA to rabbit DNA and come up with a rabbit that would produce this chemical in its milk.

 

So just to answer the spirit of your question. What I say is YES. YOU CAN GET SOMETHING THAT FILLS THE BILL and meets a specific purpose. Maybe the milk from this genetically modified rabbit would not be fair to call it "human milk" but it could HAVE IN IT WHAT YOU WANT and so it would be AS GOOD as human milk for the purpose you have in mind.

 

that's what I'd say, without being at all expert in the matter

 

 

AFAIK typically when they put a few human genes into pig DNA or mouse DNA, the animal you get LOOKS like an ordinary pig or mouse. So it doesnt give any visible or behavioral sign of being a crossbreed. So I would tend not to call that type of animal a "chimaera". IMHO it is just a genetically modified pig or mouse.

 

But perhaps technically one might call it that.

[Robbie]

Firstly I definitely dont think that counts as a chimera, a chimera is something different (where the fertilised eggs of 2 different species are stuck together to create a type of mosaic organism half one animal half the other, ever heard of a liger?!), what you are talking about is a hybrid.

 

I think it is actually possible as I have heard of goats /sheep being bred to produce certain antibodies and other junk in their milk. Why a rabbit though!?

[DrDNA]

In theory it might be considered possible, but in practice, probably not. First of all, one would need to clearly define all of discrete components of "human milk" (which is a VERY complex mixture of diverse components) and locate and clone ALL of the genes that go into making "human milk"- including all of the genes for the various structural proteins, enzymes, hormones, fatty acids, cofactors, etc. It is a relatively straightforward (but still very difficult) task to take a gene from one organism and insert into another where it can be expressed. For example, we can make a goat that secrets tissue plasminogen activator (the gene of which was taken from another organism) in its milk, but that is just one gene. HOWEVER, how one would gather ALL of the genes to make "human milk" from their assorted, various locations, clone them into a rabbit so they will be expressed in the rabbit's mammary glands......THAT is the stuff of a scifi movie.