Let #39;s Play The Repopulation - Episode 5 - Genetic Engineering
We play The Repopulation and venture into the wide world of Genetic Engineering. We kill, we collect DNA, we make biomass! Join me (Tigwyk) as we slowly work...
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Let's Play The Repopulation - Episode 5 - Genetic Engineering - Video
Let #39;s Play The Repopulation - Episode 6 - More Genetic Engineering
I (Tigwyk) actually manage to clone two different animals and demo the process of crafting "Man #39;s Best Friend". Stay tuned for more gameplay videos! This vid...
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Let's Play The Repopulation - Episode 6 - More Genetic Engineering - Video
Genetic Engineering Biotechnology
By: Meherul Islam
Excerpt from:
If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.
At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesisone in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing whod been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a company called eGenesis to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.
As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didnt hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the laboratory had a project to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled Germline Editing Meeting.
Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity.
Germ line is biologists jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to eliminate disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimers, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.
The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it.
Thats the promise. The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrows leaders and scientists?
CRISPR was discovered only three years ago but is already widely used by biologists as a kind of search-and-replace tool to alter DNA, even down to the level of a single letter. Its so precise that its widely expected to turn into a promising new approach for gene therapy treatment in people with devastating illnesses. The idea is that physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia (see Genome Surgery). But that kind of gene therapy wouldnt affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldnt get passed to future generations.
In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ line engineering would be passed on, and thats what has always made the idea seem so objectionable. So far, caution and ethical concerns have had the upper hand. A dozen countries, not including the United States, have banned germ line engineering, and scientific societies have unanimously concluded that it would be too risky to do. The European Unions convention on human rights and biomedicine says tampering with the gene pool would be a crime against human dignity and human rights.
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When it comes to gene expression -- the process by which our DNA provides the recipe used to direct the synthesis of proteins and other molecules that we need for development and survival -- scientists have so far studied one single gene at a time. A new approach developed by Harvard geneticist George Church, Ph.D., can help uncover how tandem gene circuits dictate life processes, such as the healthy development of tissue or the triggering of a particular disease, and can also be used for directing precision stem cell differentiation for regenerative medicine and growing organ transplants.
The findings, reported by Church and his team of researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School in Nature Methods, show promise that precision gene therapies could be developed to prevent and treat disease on a highly customizable, personalized level, which is crucial given the fact that diseases develop among diverse pathways among genetically-varied individuals. Wyss Core Faculty member Jim Collins, Ph.D., was also a co-author on the paper. Collins is also the Henri Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The approach leverages the Cas9 protein, which has already been employed as a Swiss Army knife for genome engineering, in a novel way. The Cas9 protein can be programmed to bind and cleave any desired section of DNA -- but now Church's new approach activates the genes Cas9 binds to rather than cleaving them, triggering them to activate transcription to express or repress desired genetic traits. And by engineering the Cas9 to be fused to a triple-pronged transcription factor, Church and his team can robustly manipulate single or multiple genes to control gene expression.
"In terms of genetic engineering, the more knobs you can twist to exert control over the expression of genetic traits, the better," said Church, a Wyss Core Faculty member who is also Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. "This new work represents a major, entirely new class of knobs that we could use to control multiple genes and therefore influence whether or not specific genetics traits are expressed and to what extent -- we could essentially dial gene expression up or down with great precision."
Such a capability could lead to gene therapies that would mitigate age-related degeneration and the onset of disease; in the study, Church and his team demonstrated the ability to manipulate gene expression in yeast, flies, mouse and human cell cultures.
"We envision using this approach to investigate and create comprehensive libraries that document which gene circuits control a wide range of gene expression," said one of the study's lead authors Alejandro Chavez, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute. Jonathan Schieman, Ph.D, of the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School, and Suhani Vora, of the Wyss Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard Medical School, are also lead co-authors on the study.
The new Cas9 approach could also potentially target and activate sections of the genome made up of genes that are not directly responsible for transcription, and which previously were poorly understood. These sections, which comprise up to 90% of the genome in humans, have previously been considered to be useless DNA "dark matter" by geneticists. In contrast to translated DNA, which contains recipes of genetic information used to express traits, this DNA dark matter contains transcribed genes which act in mysterious ways, with several of these genes often having influence in tandem.
But now, that DNA dark matter could be accessed using Cas9, allowing scientists to document which non-translated genes can be activated in tandem to influence gene expression. Furthermore, these non-translated genes could also be turned into a docking station of sorts. By using Cas9 to target and bind gene circuits to these sections, scientists could introduce synthetic loops of genes to a genome, therefore triggering entirely new or altered gene expressions.
The ability to manipulate multiple genes in tandem so precisely also has big implications for advancing stem cell engineering for development of transplant organs and regenerative therapies.
"In order to grow organs from stem cells, our understanding of developmental biology needs to increase rapidly," said Church. "This multivariate approach allows us to quickly churn through and analyze large numbers of gene combinations to identify developmental pathways much faster than has been previously capable."
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The number of people dying of cervical cancer in the world is now more than ever before, and health agencies should advise adolescent boys and girls to go in for proper vaccination to prevent them from contracting the disease, said Nobel Laureate Harald zur Hausen.
While delivering a lecture on prevention of cancers linked to infections at the Indian Genetics Congress organised by the department of genetic engineering at SRM University, Kattankulathur, on Wednesday, he said, in cervical cancer, prevention had caused a significant decrease in the number of infections.
In his address, M.S. Swaminathan, founder of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, said there are three major dimensions of hunger calorie deprivation, protein deficiency and micronutrient deficiency.
One way to overcome protein hunger is through a pulses revolution, he said.
P. Sathyanarayanan, president of SRM University, called on the Centre to enhance funding for research and development in genetic engineering.
Trilochan Mohapatra, director, Central Rice Research Institute, Bhubaneswar, received the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Swarup K. Parida and Amit Mitra of the National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi, received the young genetics researchers award.
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UK Bishops voice opposition to human genetic engineering | Newsbreak 2-26-2015
UK Catholic Bishops voice opposition to House of Lords approval of genetic modification to the Human germ line. -Archdiocese of Detroit #39;s central services are settling into their new space....
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UK Bishops voice opposition to human genetic engineering | Newsbreak 2-26-2015 - Video
Trieste team's breakthrough could lead to new AIDS drugs
(ANSA) - Trieste, March 2 - A group of researchers at Trieste's International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) has found the "dens" where HIV cells hide until they become "invisible". The breakthrough, which could lead to the development of new AIDS drugs, was made possible after the team, led by Professor Mauro Giacca, photographed the structure of HIV lymphoid cell nuclei. The study was published on Tuesday on the website of highly respected journal Nature. The AIDS virus manages to insert its DNA into the cells that it infects to become part of their genetic makeup. But up to now why the virus decides to combine with only some of the 20,000 human genes and how it manages to hide from medicines inside these genes had been a mystery.
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14 hours ago Yunzhou Wei . Credit: Andrew Davis Tucker
An immune system that helps bacteria combat viruses is yielding unlikely results such as the ability to edit genome sequences and potentially correct mutations that cause human disease.
University of Georgia researchers Michael and Rebecca Terns were among the first to begin to study the bacterial immune system. They now have identified a key link in how bacteria respond and adapt to foreign invaders.
The new study, authored by the Terns and postdoctoral research associate Yunzhou Wei in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of biochemistry and molecular biology, was published recently in Genes & Development.
A bacterium gains immunity against a virus through a sophisticated process of acquiring a fragment of the viral DNA and incorporating the sequence into its own genome. This virus identification sequence is kept in a locus commonly known as a CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
CRISPR-associated proteins then use the sequence to recognize and destroy viruses.
A CRISPR-associated protein known as Cas9 destroys invading viral DNA and has been co-opted as a tool for programmable genome editing. This new tool provides a way to make gene deletions, corrections of mutations and additions of new genes in any genome.
The UGA study highlights the discovery of a new role of the Cas9 protein in the initial acquisition of the invader sequence.
"The recognition that this enzyme functions both in capture and in killing provides us with a link between those two processes that we think is involved in ensuring that the process is specific for the virus and avoids potential damage to its own genome," said Rebecca Terns, a senior research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biology. "Our findings implicate Cas9 in the recognition of a secondary, invader-confirmation signal called a PAM."
In the study, the team describes the basic set of machinery that is required to obtain a specific fragment of viral sequence and insert the fragment in a specific location.
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Link identified between virus recognition, destruction in bacterial immune system
15 minutes ago This is a figure depicting four regulatory models for genome-edited crops. Credit: Araki, M. and Ishii, T./Trends in Plant Science 2015
A survey of rice, wheat, barley, fruit, and vegetable crops found that most mutants created by advanced genetic engineering techniques may be out of the scope of current genetically modified organism (GMO) regulations. In a review of these findings, published in the February 25 issue of the Cell Press journal Trends in Plant Science, two bioethicists from Hokkaido University propose new regulatory models for genome-edited crops and declare a call to action for clarifying the social issues associated with such genetically engineered crops.
"Modern genome editing technology has allowed for far more efficient gene modification, potentially impacting future agriculture," says Tetsuya Ishii, PhD, of Hokkaido University's Office of Health and Safety. "However, genome editing raises a regulatory issue by creating indistinct boundaries in GMO regulations because the advanced genetic engineering can, without introducing new genetic material, make a gene modification which is similar to a naturally occurring mutation."
Under current regulations, a GMO is a living organism that has been altered by a novel combination of genetic material, including the introduction of a transgene. Advanced genetic engineering technologies, including ZFN, TALEN, and CRISPR/Cas9, raise regulatory issues because they don't require transgenes to make alterations to the genome. They can simply pluck out a short DNA sequence or add a mutation to an existing gene.
"Genome editing technology is advancing rapidly; therefore it is timely to review the regulatory system for plant breeding by genome editing," says Dr. Ishii. "Moreover, we need to clarify the differences between older genetic engineering techniques and modern genome editing, and shed light on various issues towards social acceptance of genome edited crops."
In their study, Dr. Ishii and a member of his research staff, Motoko Araki, present four regulatory models in order to resolve the indistinct regulatory boundaries that genome editing has created in GMO regulations. They propose that the most stringent regulation (in which most of the mutants are subject to the regulations, whereas only a portion of deletion and insertion mutants fall outside the regulations) should be initially adopted and gradually relaxed because the cultivation and food consumption of genome-edited crops is likely to increase in the near future.
While policy-level discussions about the regulations of genome-edited organisms are slowly taking place around the world, according to Dr. Ishii, his study will serve as a basis for the conversation with regulatory agencies in the world as well as the Japanese Ministry of the Environment.
Explore further: Coming soon: Genetically edited fruit?
Recent advances that allow the precise editing of genomes now raise the possibility that fruit and other crops might be genetically improved without the need to introduce foreign genes, according to researchers writing in ...
One of the most exciting scientific advances made in recent years is CRISPRthe ability to precisely edit the genome of cells. However, although this method has incredible potential, the process is extremely inefficient. ...
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15 hours ago CRISPR systems allow bacteria to adapt to new viral threats. Above, Staphylococcus aureus microbes lacking a CRISPR system are killed off by the bacteria-attacking virus NM4. This plate approximates the concentration of virus particles used in the recent experiments. Credit: Zach Veilleux / The Rockefeller University
Bacteria may not have brains, but they do have memories, at least when it comes to viruses that attack them. Many bacteria have a molecular immune system which allows these microbes to capture and retain pieces of viral DNA that they have encountered in the past, in order to recognize and destroy it when it shows up again.
Research at Rockefeller University described Wednesday (February 18) in Nature offers new insight into the mysterious process by which this system works to encode viral DNA in a microbe's genome for later use as guides for virus-cutting enzymes.
"Microbes, like vertebrates, have immune systems capable of adapting to new threats. Cas9, one enzyme employed by these systems, uses immunological memories to guide cuts to viral genetic code. However, very little is known about how these memories are acquired in the first place," says Assistant Professor Luciano Marraffini, head of the Laboratory of Bacteriology. "Our work shows that Cas9 also directs the formation of these memories among certain bacteria."
These memories are embedded in the bacterial equivalent of an adaptive immune system capable of discerning helpful from harmful viruses called a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) system. It works by altering the bacterium's genome, adding short viral sequences called spacers in between the repeating DNA sequences. These spacers form the memories of past invaders. They serve as guides for enzymes encoded by CRISPR-associated genes (Cas), which seek out and destroy those same viruses should they attempt to infect the bacterium again.
Cas9's ability to make precision cuts within a genome - viral or otherwise - has caught the attention of researchers who now use it to alter cells' genetics for experimental or therapeutic purposes. But it is still not well understood just how this CRISPR system works in its native bacteria.
Some evidence suggested that other Cas enzymes managed the memory-making process on their own, without Cas9. But because of the way Cas9 goes about identifying the site at which to make a cut, the researchers, including co-first authors Robert Heler, a graduate student, and Poulami Samai, a postdoc in the lab, suspected a role for Cas9 in memory making.
In addition to matching its CRISPR guide sequence up with the DNA of the virus, Cas9 needs to find a second cue nearby: a PAM (protospacer adjacent motif) sequence in the viral DNA. This is a crucial step, since it is the absence of a PAM sequence that prevents Cas9 from attacking the bacterium's own memory-containing DNA.
"Because Cas9 must recognize a PAM sequence before cutting the viral DNA, it made sense to us that Cas9 would also recognize the PAM sequence when the system is forming a memory of its first encounter with a virus," Heler says. "This is a new and unexpected role for Cas9."
To test their hypothesis, Heler swapped the Cas9 enzymes between the immune systems of Streptococcus pyogenes and Streptococcus thermophilus, each of which recognizes a different PAM sequence. As a result, the PAM sequences followed, swapping between the two bugs - evidence that Cas9 is responsible for identifying the PAM during memory formation. In another experiment, he altered the part of Cas9 that binds to the PAM sequence, and found the microbes then began acquiring the target viral sequences randomly, making them unusable.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com @BednarChuck
As a general rule, humans like to know exactly what it is that theyre eating. In the past, this was an easy task you could pick up a tomato, a can of corn and a pack of ground beef and be fairly confident that you knew where they came from. In recent years, however, scientists have become increasingly involved in food production, causing some confusion amongst consumers.
[Related story: GMO potato approved by USDA]
If youre one of the people who sometimes feel overwhelmed when you start hearing terms such as genetic modification and selective breeding, dont worry we here at RedOrbit feel your pain, so weve created this handy little guide to help clear up some of the confusion.
Genetic modification (GMO)
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been at the center of much of the discussion over scientifically-manipulated food. While a 2010 EU-funded study found that eating GMO foods is no more risky that eating conventionally-grown products, there are laws requiring these goods to carry special labels in over 60 countries, and some remain concerned about their safety.
According to the nonprofit George Mateljan Foundation, a GMO is defined as any organism that has had its core genetic material altered using genetic engineering techniques. In other words, the crops or creatures have had their DNA or RNA fundamentally changed in a laboratory in order to add or enhance specific traits, allowing them to grow larger, stay fresh longer, and so on.
A good example of this is the Arctic apple, a genetically-modified apple produced by a Canadian company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, that received USDA approval earlier this week. The Arctic apple underwent a process called RNA interference (RNAi), which blocked a normally-occurring enzyme and kept the apple from turning brown after it had been sliced. [Related story: GMO apple approved for sale in US]
Selective breeding
Like genetic modification, selective breeding is performed in order to promote specific traits in a plant or animal. However, the selective breeding process does not involve making any changes to the core biological makeup of a plants genetic makeup at least not directly. Rather, organisms which strongly exhibit specific characteristics are bred together to emphasize those traits.
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Debate about Genetic engineering between two students; Jocelyn and Sarah. The camera man being me/Angel and Jade as the judge.
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