The necessity of conditional gene expression in pigs for transgenic models is raised. Thus, in this study, Cre-loxP conditional expression in porcine fetal fibroblasts was investigated and the transformed fibroblasts were reprogrammed in enucleated oocytes for further early embryonic development. Fetal fibroblasts from miniature pigs were used for transfection with pCALNL-DsRed including floxed neomycin resistant gene and selected with 750 ug/mL neomycin for two weeks. The transfected cells did not express DsRed under fluorescence microscope. After transient transfection of plasmid DNA expressing Cre, the fibroblasts began to express DsRed. The cells expressing Ds- Red were employed into somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). A total of 121 oocytes were used for SCNT and 76 cloned embryos (62.8%)were cleaved. Six blastocysts were grown up after SCNT and expressed DsRed. Deletion of floxed neomycin resistant gene was confirmed by RT-PCR in cloned blastocysts. Taken together, this study demonstrated that Cre-loxP recombination in miniature pig fibroblasts were successfully worked and those sequential transformed cells were developed into pre-implantation stage via SCNT.

LIST is the Lyman-α Imaging Solar Telescope, a project funded by the Korean government to fly on the second Korean Science and Technology research Satellite (STSat-2) due to launch in December 2005. The Principal Investigator is Dr. Minhwan Jang of Kyung-Hee University and of the Space Payload Research Center (SPARC), a consortium of Korean universities and institutions formed to develop scientific research projects in space. The purpose of the LIST project is to design, build, and operate an instrument on STSat-2 which will make images of the Sun from Earth orbit at the wavelength of the Hydrogen Lyman-a emission line at 121.6 nm. LIST has a simple design concept comprised of a small telescope to image the full disk of the Sun onto a CCD detector and a set of filters to isolate the 121.6 nm wavelength.