It's all very well to plant Rover under a rosebush. But a pair of students at the Royal College of Art in London have a better idea: one that would keep your dog's--or your own--DNA perpetuated indefinitely. The project is called Transplant Biopresence, and it entails inserting human DNA into trees.
Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara say they are looking for funding and scientific collaborators. If all goes as planned, they hope to have a transgenic testimonial tree created in a year. To begin, they plan on transferring snippets of their own DNA so that every cell of the tree will carry them. A standard approach is to insert DNA into the chromosome of a plant cell, then use hormones to regenerate an entire plant. They plan to work full-time on the project after graduating in July. Eventually the duo hopes to insert an entire human genome that would replace a tree's junk DNA.
"It may be art, but I don't think it will work," says plant geneticist Rick Meilan of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Chucking out so-called junk DNA may remove cryptic yet essential functions for the plant, he says, and adding human DNA would likely toss new wrenches into the genetic machinery.
