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July 18 - July 24, 2020
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
micropigs, swine no bigger than large cats, which can be sold as pets.
chromothripsis—a
Scientists have precisely identified well over four thousand different kinds of DNA mutations that can cause genetic disease.
Repairing a defective gene would be like finding a needle in a haystack and then removing that needle without disturbing a single strand of hay in the process.
A full 8 percent of the human genome—over 250 million letters of DNA—is a remnant of ancient retroviruses that infected ancestors of our species millennia ago.
Cells, it seemed, could do most of the hard work of modifying their genomes all by themselves.
disguised as a second chromosome, that it could use to fix the broken site.
“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”
CRISPRs, Jill said, had been found in almost half of all the bacterial genomes that had been sequenced to date and in nearly every archaeal genome.
Even more intriguing, there seemed to be an inverse correlation between the number of DNA sequences in a bacterium’s CRISPR that matched viral DNA,
In many ways, the foundations of molecular genetics were laid by experiments done with these bacterial viruses.
its genome was the first to be synthesized entirely from scratch.
they are also the most prevalent biological entity on our planet—by a long shot. They are as ubiquitous in the natural world as light and soil, and they can be found in dirt, water, our intestines, hot springs, ice cores, and just about anywhere else that supports life.
bacterial viruses outnumber them ten to one. They cause roughly a trillion trillion infections on earth every second,
CRISPR-associated genes,
this meant that, although a huge geographic distance separated Yellowstone and Kamchatka, they had to share a common ancestor.
DNA. Working with yet another microorganism called Staphylococcus epidermidis, a relatively benign human skin bacterium (but a close relative of the dangerous, drug-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus), Luciano
placed bacteria on an equal footing with humans by showing that we both have incredibly complex cellular reactions to infection.
It was almost as if CRISPR had co-evolved with cas genes; it didn’t seem possible to have one without the other.
an artificial mini-chromosome, called a plasmid,
Cascade (yet another biologist’s acronym, standing for “CRISPR-associated complex for antiviral defense”)—acted like GPS coordinates, defining
And by 2015, the classification would change yet again to include two broad classes comprising six types and nineteen subtypes.
S. thermophilus is the lone bacterial strain in the Streptococcus genus that is generally recognized as safe in humans and other mammals. S. pyogenes and virtually all other members of the Streptococcus genus are known pathogens for a host of mammalian species, including our own. And
The Csn1 enzyme had gone by a variety of names over the years before one—Cas9—finally stuck, in the summer of 2011.
The crucial components for DNA cutting were the Cas9 enzyme, the CRISPR RNA, and the tracrRNA.
On June 8, 2012, a sunny Friday afternoon, I clicked Confirm on my computer, formally submitting our paper for consideration to the journal Science. It would be published just twenty days later, on June 28, and nothing after that would ever be the same—not for me, not for my collaborators, and not for the field of biology. In that moment, however, my elation at this milestone was muted. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.
have had their genomes rewritten using CRISPR, the very same bacterial system that evolved to destroy them.
genome engineering, a reflection
short insertions or deletions of DNA (known as indels)
often feels like the genome-engineering applications made possible by CRISPR are limited only by our collective imagination.
a few months after the first reports of gene editing with CRISPR were published, Forbes magazine predicted that this technology would change biotech forever.
The only thing necessary to get started is a copy of the basic CRISPR-containing artificial chromosome, or plasmid.
(In fact, editing the yeast genome to make new flavors of beer
Weighing the dangers inherent in a technology like CRISPR against the responsibility to use its power for the benefit of humanity and our planet will be a test like no other. Yet it’s one that we must pass. Given the stakes, we simply have no alternative.
It amazes me to realize that we are on the cusp of a new era in the history of life on earth—an age in which humans exercise an unprecedented level of control over the genetic composition of the species that co-inhabit our planet.
xenotransplantation—the
third most important food crop
converts these sugars into acrylamide, a chemical that is a neurotoxin and a potential carcinogen. Cold-induced
under this definition, just about every food we eat, aside from wild mushrooms, wild berries, wild game, and wild fish, could be considered a GMO.
well over fifty GMO crops have been developed and approved for commercial cultivation in the United States, among them canola, corn, cotton, papaya, rice, soybean, squash, and many more. In 2015, 92 percent of all corn, 94 percent of all cotton, and 94 percent of all soybeans grown in the United States were genetically engineered in this way.
Nevertheless, nearly 60 percent of Americans perceive GMOs as unsafe.
Red grapefruits created by neutron radiation,
Advocates argue that high-yielding farmed salmon would be a boon to the environment because they would reduce depletion of wild fish stocks, decrease the amount of salmon imported into the United States
transgenic pig containing an E. coli gene that allowed the animals to better digest a phosphorus-containing compound
Enviropig manure contained 75 percent less phosphorus, which could have been an enormous benefit to the planet and to the people who lived and worked near pig farms.
and beef cattle produce only the profitable males (since females convert feed to muscle far less efficiently).
Food producers typically remove horns at a young age by burning off horn buds with a heated iron, causing tissue damage and a significant amount of stress and pain for the traumatized calves.
thirty human years—means
Someday soon, we might be using pigs as bioreactors to produce valuable drugs like therapeutic human proteins, which are too complex to synthesize from scratch and can only be produced in living cells.
