Monkey Color Blind
To a colour blind monkey, this simply looks like the number '57'. Andre Dib / shutterstock Benefits of blindness But colour blind vision might actually be an advantage in some situations. CURING COLOR BLINDNESS IN NONHUMAN PRIMATES Experiments using gene therapy in an attempt to cure congenital red-green color blindness in nonhuman primates were performed on adult squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus).
In this species, as in many other New World primates, there is a single opsin gene on the X chromosome, but there is allelic diversity at the locus (Jacobs 1984; Mollon et al. 1984. Discover the fascinating world of monkey color perception and find out if these animals are truly colorblind.
BBC NEWS | Health | 'Gene cure' for colour blindness
Explore the latest research and understanding of how monkeys see the world through their eyes. A Silicon Valley biotech firm is adapting a color blindness cure that worked in monkeys to treat humans. Monkeys once color-blind can now see the world in full color thanks to gene therapy.
The results demonstrate the potential for such methods to eventually cure human vision disorders, from color. The prospect of ameliorating the problems caused by color blindness makes it an attractive future target for human gene therapy. Because the monkey visual system is similar to that of humans, a human gene was used to replace the missing visual pigment of the monkeys.
Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness in Monkeys | Discover Magazine
A treatment that appears safe and effective in treating natural color-blindness in monkeys might just lead to colorizing the world for similarly afflicted people, along with restoring sight to. Scientists have used gene therapy to give full colour vision to adult squirrel monkeys that had been colour-blind since birth, opening up a world of formerly invisible reds and oranges, right in. Female squirrel monkeys can see in color, but male monkeys are typically red.
Gene Therapy Here is one of our squirrel monkeys, Dalton, who was treated for red-green color blindness enjoying a feast of colored fruits and vegetables. The image on the left was digitally altered to simulate what the scene would look like to a person (or monkey) with red.
