Glowing transgenic sushi

It feels a like a flash back to the heyday of black lights and lava lamps, but cutting edge transgenic technology has paved the way to fluorescent sushi.

This stuff isn’t available in supermarkets (yet), but all you need is a few pet zebra fish, genetically tweaked to contain the Green Fluorescent Protein GFP (or as I like to call it Glowing Jellyfish Protein). You can buy GloFish via the internet in the US at least, except in California – smush them up them in a blender and you too can make your very own psychedelic snack.

Check out this video from Glowing Sushi, the people who came up with this idea in the first place.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQz60FBTfts[/youtube]

The glowing proteins break down with heat, so as it says on the Glowing Sushi website

If you want your food to glow in the dark, don’t cook it!

While there’s little evidence that eating GM fish does us any harm,  do we really want to start eating our pets? And there’s no doubt GFP is a groundbreaking research tool but should we be rolling out this technology to the pet and food industries just for fun?

I’m not even too sure how serious the guys at Glowing Sushi are about all this, or whether they’re just making a point about the silly things we get up to in the name of cuisine.

Personally, I’m not a fan of tinkering with nature on a grand scale (tonight I’ll probably dream of oceans swarming with glowing fish – oh no, wait, they already are). But on balance, if it comes down to a choice, I’d probably recommend eating home-made, aquarium-bred, glowing zebrafish over a slice of wild bluefin tuna.