White Rabbits Glow Green in the Dark after Genetic Mutation [VIDEO]

In normal lighting, a recently born pair of rabbits look just like their furry, white siblings, but once the lights go off, the bunnies really make their mark by glowing bright green in the dark.

While the uncanny florescence is certainly the most noticeable feature of the rabbits, it is merely an intended side effect of a grander experiment to show that genetic manipulation works successfully in rabbits, according to the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where the active transgenesis technique used to create the glowing rabbits was created.

The rabbits were engineered by researchers in Turkey at University of Istanbul and Marmara University under the guidance of University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Emeritus Professor Ryuzo Yanagimachi and Associate Professor Stefan Moisyadi.

"Our colleagues in Turkey have been so excited by the birth of the transgenic rabbits--and that excitement has spread to the public through news coverage on Turkish television," said Moisyadi, who is a native of Turkey. "It's been wonderful to see this international scientific collaboration produce such positive results."

Speaking with local Hawai'i news stations, Moisyadi said the rabbits will live just as long as their ordinary counterparts and show no adverse reaction to their new color, which is the result of the insertion of a fluorescent protein in jellyfish DNA into rabbit embryos, which were then implanted in the mother rabbit. When the litter of eight rabbits was born, two of the kit carried on the "glowing gene."

One day the researchers hope to replicate the process in larger animals.

"Sheep, cows, and even pigs," Moisyadi said to Hawai'i news station KHON2. "The benefits in doing it in large animals is to create bio-reactors that basically produce pharmaceuticals that can be made a lot cheaper."

Moisyadi said that for patients suffering from hemophilia who need blood-clotting enzymes in their blood could be a future beneficiary of the research.

"[We] can make those enzymes a lot cheaper in animals with barrier reactives rather than a factory that will cost billions of dollars to build,' Dr Moisyadi said, according to the Daily Mail.

This is not the first time an otherwise non-fluorescent animal has been made to glow in the dark. The technique was pioneered in the 1980s using laboratory mice. Since then the experiment has been replicated in kittens, puppies, monkeys and piglets, according to the Daily Mail.

In April, scientists in Uruguay created a flock of glow-in-the-dark sheep.

The Turkey-Hawai'i team is now at work producing its own transgenic sheep. In November the birth of Turkey's first transgenic lamb is expected, according to the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.