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Are Chimeras Real?

Chimera Examples -

And there are the examples of the frequent statements by Buridan that chimera absolutely, "...do not exist." See pp. 10, 15, etc. See our many examples of real chimera at the end of this review.

Human-Mouse Chimera:

From Science Magazine, SIGHTINGS: Jurassic Mouse, Richard Peters and Robert Sikorski, Science 1997 July 18; 277: 397a

"The resulting ES-rcells were injected into mouse embryos to produce chimeras. These chimeras were examined and bred to look for phenotypes and germ-line transmission of the human chromosome fragments." ...

"To summarize, Tomizuka et al. found that the DNA from all three human chromosomes could be introduced into mouse chimeras."

Chicken-Quail Chimera:

From Science Magazine, DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY: Embryo's Organizational Chart Redrawn, Gretchen Vogel, Science, 1998 June 19; 280: 1838-1839.

"But Le Douarin's work indicates that this classic hierarchy is too simple. In very early chick embryos, her team replaced a group of notochord precursor cells with the corresponding cells from a quail embryo. Chick and quail cells are readily distinguishable, making it easy to track the fate of the transplanted cells. A few days later, the team found that the resulting chimera had formed a notochord and a floor plateboth made of quail cells."

Dinosaur-Bird Chimera:

From Science Magazine, PALEONTOLOGY: Missing Link Ties Birds, Dinosaurs, Ann Gibbons, Science, 1998 March 20; 279: 1851-1852.

"Researchers like John Ruben of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who argues against a dinosaur origin of birds, agree that R. ostromi looks like a dinosaurbecause, they say, its hind limbs actually come from a small dinosaur. 'I think it's a chimeraa little dinosaur hindquarter, with a bird's forelimbs,' Ruben says. Agrees University of Kansas paleo-ornithologist Larry Martin, 'It's another dinosaur trying to hit it big as a bird.' Martin thinks that the hind limb belonged to a dinosaur and that the wing bones could have been those of another ancient bird found at the same site, Vorona berivotrensis; the only known skeleton of that bird is missing its wings. 'They owe us a close
explanation why this can't be that bird,' says Martin."

Mouse-Hamster Chimera:

From Science Magazine, A Transmembrane Form of the Prion Protein in Neurodegenerative Disease, Ramanujan S. Hegde, James A. Mastrianni, Michael R. Scott, Kathryn A. DeFea, Patrick Tremblay, Marilyn Torchia, Stephen J. DeArmond, Stanley B. Prusiner, and Vishwanath R. Lingappa, Science, 1998 February 6; 279: 827-834.

"To explore this hypothesis, we first identified four mutations within STE-TM1 (shown in Fig. 1C) that greatly alter the ratio of the topological forms when assayed by cell-free translation. Two of these mutations (KHII and STE) were engineered into Syrian hamster PrP (SHaPrP), and the other two (AV3 and G123P) were put into MH2MPrP, a mouse-hamster chimera in which residues 94 to 188 are from hamster PrP."

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