CHINA:With the year of the pig due to start in late February, Chinese scientists say they have successfully bred a partially fluorescent green pig.
This, they claim, will help give stem-cell research a boost and help to cure disease.
A research team at the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin managed to breed three transgenic pigs by injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs, Prof Liu Zhonghua told the Xinhua news agency. "The mouth, trotters and tongue of the pigs are green under ultraviolet light," he said.
The process was, perhaps understandably, quite complex and involved injecting the genetic material from jellyfish into the womb of a sow, which gave birth to the three pigs 114 days later in Harbin, the capital of the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
Researchers at the institute will be able to monitor changes in the tissues of the transgenic swine - commonly used to study human diseases - during their physical development, said Prof Liu.
China is an enthusiastic player in the area of genetic engineering and cloning research. There has been none of the ethical debate that has slowed the development of the technology in many western countries.
As well as working on bio- engineering to help cure disease, Chinese scientists have also been busy working on cloning and genetic engineering as a way of boosting food production in an effort to feed the country's 1.3 billion people.
The government started a "super-rice" project in 1996 to improve the production and quality of rice and has recently been focusing on developing "super-animals" through bio-engineering which will increase stockbreeding output.
One bio-engineering project has recently completed an investigation into the DNA of some of China's agricultural animals, examining the origin and evolution of 92 varieties of pig, 37 varieties of cattle, 11 types of yak, 18 types of sheep and 25 sorts of goat.
The aim of this project is to produce "super-pigs" and "super-chickens" - although it was too early to say if the super-animals would be fluorescent green or not.