Mice engineered to see in colour

The not-so-blind mice had their vision enhanced with the addition of a human light-receptor gene.

Scientists were surprised to find that the mice rapidly made themselves at home in their new colourful world.

Their brains quickly rewired themselves to process the extra visual information, so that colour influenced the animals' behaviour.

The researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, had expected this ability to emerge slowly over several subsequent generations.

The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that the brains of mammals are flexible enough to allow the almost instantaneous upgrading of colour vision.