One of the most important things for industry production of transgenic fish is whether the fish meal is safe to the health of human beings, which means the foreign genes and their expressed products might be harmful to fish and the animal eating this fish. For the transgenic common carp produced by injecting fusion genes which included chum salmon' s growth hormone gene and common carp's metallothionine promoter, two things should be investigated. One is whether the transgenic common carp will produce excessive amounts of growth hormone in its body, and the foreign hormone how to affect the animal eating this fish. The other thing is whether this fish will accumulate excessive heavy metal in its body, what effect will be on the animal eating this fish. The investigation of the concentrations of the foreign growth hormone in transgenic carp is reported. This article examines the effect of a metallothionine transgene on the residual heavy metal concentrations in the transgenic common carp and the cat eating the transgenic carp. Using flame atomic absorption spectrophotometry, we measured the concentrations of the heavy mental elements including Zn, Cu, Cd, and Pb in the muscle, liver, kidney and gills of the transgenic common carp and non-transgenic carp. Also measured were the concentrations of Zn and Cd in the muscle, liver and kidney of the cat fed with transgenic and non-transgenic common carps. In the cat, there was no significant difference (P > 0.05) in tissue concentrations of heavy metals between the experimental group and the control group. The heavy metal concentrations in the non-transgenic common carp and transgenic common carp were statistically similar. The result showed that metallothionine gene as a promoter for aquaculture fish genetransfer would not bring about the heavy metal accumulations in transgenic fish and animal eating them。
展开▼
