Daily Archives: February 17, 2022

Genetic engineering, also calledgenetic modification, is the direct manipulation of an organismsgenomeusing biotechnology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within and across species boundaries to produce improved or novelorganisms. Read important facts about Genetic Engineering in this article for the IAS Exam.

NewDNAmay be inserted in the host genome by first isolating and copying the genetic material of interest usingmolecular cloningmethods to generate a DNA sequence, or by synthesizing the DNA and then inserting this construct into the host organism.Genesmay be removed, or knocked out, using anuclease.Gene targetingis a different technique that useshomologous recombinationto change an endogenous gene and can be used to delete a gene, removeexons, add a gene, or introducepoint mutations.

Aspirants reading, GEAC can also refer to topics lined below:

Medicine, research, industry and agriculture are a few sectors where genetic engineering applies. It can be used on various plants, animals and microorganisms. The first microorganism to be genetically modified is bacteria.

Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) is the biotech regulator in India. It is created under the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Read more about GEAC in the linked article.

There are five bodies that are authorized to handle rules noted underEnvironment Protection Act 1986 Rules for Manufacture, Use, Import, Export and Storage of Hazardous Microorganisms/Genetically Engineered Organisms or Cells 1989. These are:

Soybean-Herbicide tolerance,Canola-Altered fatty acid composition,Plum-Virus resistance,Corn-Insect resistance

Pros:Tackling and Defeating Diseases,Getting Rid of All Illnesses in Young and Unborn Children,Potential to Live Longer,Produce New Foods,Faster Growth in Animals and Plants,Pest and Disease Resistance.Cons:May Lead to Genetic Defects,Limits Genetic Diversity,Reduced Nutritional Value,Risky Pathogens,Negative Side Effects

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Genetic Engineering - Meaning, Applications, Advantages ...

Genetic engineering in is founded on the idea of manipulating the gene pool in order to make lives better. One way of doing this is to start from the basic, from the egg cell and sperm cell. Another way is to swap bad genes in a fully formed human with good ones.

There are moral and ethical controversies surrounding genetic engineering or genetic mutation in humans. Personal convictions alone dictate people what to oppose and what to accept. However, it takes an objective inspection of this medical technology for us to draw a more acceptable conclusion and prevent pre-created biases.

1. Helps Prevent Genetic DisordersMany of the diseases today are hereditary or genetic. By manipulating the genes in humans, scientists find a way to prevent people from suffering from an otherwise hereditary health condition.

2. Helps Individual Have Better LifeGenetic engineering helps humans have a chance at a healthier, longer life with more desirable physical characteristics. By altering the genes of fetuses, there is a strong likelihood that future generations will be taller, stronger, healthier and better looking.

3. Helps Deepen Understanding of GenesPromoting genetic engineering is one way of deepening our understanding about human genetics. It helps scientists find ways to cure or prevent hereditary diseases, most especially.

4. Allows Parents to Choose Babys TraitsSome parents would want their children not to inherit their less desirable traits, if given the chance. By modifying the genes of babies, parents have a chance at designing their own babies, according to what they want gender, color of hair, etc.

5. Probes into Medical AdvancementsThere are many areas in science, which continue to be a mystery to even the most learned scientists and researchers today. Other advancements in the medical field can spring from genetic engineering.

1. Test Failure Leads to Termination of EmbryosSince genetic engineering is not a perfect science, and far from being so, there will be failures along the way, and this leads to termination of embryos with undesirable gene pool. To some people, this is tantamount to abortion.

2. Who Decides the Good and Bad GenesNo one has the right to decide or judge what specific traits are good or bad. With genetic engineering, the power likely rests on the scientists, the future parents, or the political leader. However, are these people accountable or responsible when experiments go wrong?

3. Engineered Babies Could Have Worse Imperfections When the actual results are not the outcome initially intended, society could have grave issues regarding the presence of erroneously engineered humans, specifically if they turn out to be mentally ill, psychotic, abusive, or non-responsive. How does society control these badly designed humans by murder, by further experimentation or by imprisonment?

4. It Is Very ExpensiveEngineering the genes of animals is already intricate and expensive enough, how much more an entire human being? It takes a team of skilled geneticists and researchers, plus a topnotch facility, to perform the experiment. This means that genetic engineering may only be available to the wealthy, furthering the gap in society.

5. Reduces the Individuality among HumansWhen there is a consensus as to which traits are good or bad, there is a tendency for future generations to lose their diversity and individuality. There will be no short people because being tall is more desirable. There will be no fat people because being slender is more desirable. Ultimately, the reduction of undesirable traits in humans would lead to a generation of pure breeds with very little capability of adapting to changes in the environment as in the case of pure breed animals, which are prone to disease.

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Genetic Engineering in Humans Pros and Cons List | NYLN.org

Sometimes an adventure in science history begins with a chance find in a junk shop.

In the summer of 2021, a member of the public found a framed 1984 photograph of Professor David Hopwood in a shop in Surrey. We dont know how it came to be there, but we were delighted to be able to acquire it for the John Innes Centre Archives where (now Professor Sir) David Hopwoods papers are housed.

An artefact like this demands a back-story.

Although the photo has a press release pasted on the back, we wanted to know more about the circumstances behind this specially commissioned image.

The first port of call was David himself. His records were able to take us back to 1984 85 and some of the background behind the making and reproduction of this image.

The story begins with a request for David to give a 40-minute talk at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Norwich on Friday 14th September 1984.

The British Association (BA) had only visited Norwich on three previous occasions (1868, 1935 and 1961). Their fourth visit to Norwich would take place for the first time at a university venue (the University of East Anglia was by then twenty years old), with the visiting delegates able to stay on campus for the princely sum of 11 per night.

The largest scientific meeting of its kind in the UK, the BAs typical audience was described then as scientists and technologists from disciplines other than that of lecturer, representatives of industry, commerce and the professions, teachers, school students and university students, and the general public with an interest in science, its applications and implications.

At the time, in the week of the BA meeting, the national press devoted more column inches to science than at any other time of year.

David accepted the invite to the conference, and his talk appeared in the meeting programme as, Advances in genetic engineering allow the isolation of genes for antibiotic production from Streptomyces organisms, the major antibiotic producers. This will lead to more efficient antibiotic production and to useful new compounds.

However, this brief abstract doesnt reveal the breakthrough that David was about to announce. His team at the John Innes Institute had produced the first hybrid antibiotic by genetic engineering.

David had an advance publicity call from the BA press officer- could David provide 70 copies (photocopy or stencil) of his finished paper and a 1-page abstract for distribution to the journalists and broadcasters attending?

The next request was from Nexus, the UEA Student Union television service (dubbed Norwichs secret TV channel). Nexus had its own studio in the Student Union building, and a low power transmitter enabled them to broadcast to the TV viewing rooms at the end of the building and some of the halls of residence, but the audience was primarily students who would watch at lunchtimes on closed circuit TV in the foyer of the Union building.

Nexus had secured an agreement with the University to provide a TV and information service throughout the BA conference and wanted to pre-record a short informal interview with David to be shown the day before the address.

He responded to these requests by phone or post, this was before the advent of email.

So, what was the breakthrough that Davids paper was about to announce to the world and why was it important? David later described this piece of work as the closest he got to a eureka moment in his career (as recalled in 2011 in an interview with Professor Tony Maxwell for BBCs Bang goes the theory).

Davids work centred on the genetics and microbiology of a strain of Streptomyces coelicolor, an Actinomycete. This group of soil-dwelling bacteria had originally fascinated biologists because they appeared to be intermediate between bacteria and fungi.

That taxonomic question was solved in the 1950s when it was confirmed that they are true bacteria and only resemble fungi, growing in mycelial colonies with aerial hyphae and spores (to the naked eye they have a fuzzy appearance like mould when grown on an agar plate).

It was the knowledge that these microbes could provide valuable drugs for medicine that spurred many laboratories to continue studying them. Actinomycetes secrete antibiotics in nature to help them compete with other microorganisms living in the soil.

The discovery of Streptomycin in 1943 (isolated from a strain of Streptomyces griseus), the first effective treatment for TB, resulted in the setting up of drug discovery labs around the world, mostly in pharmaceutical companies.

For many years the key to finding new antimicrobial drugs was to look at the natural products of the soil. By 1984, streptomycetes had yielded more than 70 commercially important antibiotics, but it was thought that most of what the soil had to offer had been developed.

The hunt for new drugs was becoming harder and harder. David Hopwoods breakthrough offered an alternative approach the possibility of making unnatural natural products to extend the range of available compounds.

Davids lab (including Dr Francisco Malpartida and Helen Kieser at the John Innes Institute, now John Innes Centre), in collaboration with a Japanese group, had produced the worlds first hybrid antibiotic called mederrhodin A by genetic engineering.

Genes for antibiotic production were first cloned from the parent strain of Streptomyces coelicolor. The cloned genes were introduced into another streptomycete, one that usually makes a brown coloured antibiotic called medermycin.

The genetically engineered streptomycete then began to secrete a new, purple-coloured antibiotic (mederrhodin A) made by both sets of genes working in collaboration. Spectroscopic analysis by Professor Satoshi muras group at the Kitasato Institute, Tokyo confirmed its hybrid chemical structure.

The appearance of the purple colour was Davids eureka moment. The experiment had demonstrated the exciting possibility of creating new compounds by transferring genes between different organisms that make different compounds.

Scientists had already mastered the trick of getting one species of bacteria to manufacture a compound normally made by another species (by gene transfer), indeed Davids lab had first demonstrated the cloning of the complete set of actinorhodin genes in this way, but producing a totally novel compound by genetic engineering, this was new.

With this experiment the new pharmaceutical field of unnatural natural products was born. These methods also offered the prospect of cloning genes controlling rate-limiting steps in antibiotic biosynthesis, which could improve yields in antibiotic production.

This work was only possible because there had been three decades of prior research to gain a detailed knowledge of the genetics of streptomycetes (starting with Davids PhD studies in Cambridge in the 1950s), and the recent development of effective methods for the isolation and manipulation of Streptomyces genes. But thats another story.

Davids archive enables us to track some of the papers that covered the news of the discovery. The first UK clipping is from Hospital Doctor on 20th September 1984, soon followed by The Economist (22nd September), then the New Scientist (4th October) and The Scotsman (28th November).

It is likely that the UK publicity was generated directly from the BA meeting, but Davids paper also had an interesting afterlife, and the picture from the junk shop is the clue to it.

The Central Office of Information (COI) wanted to organize some publicity on the new hybrid antibiotic, and commissioned two colour photographs of David, one where he appears above a table of petri dishes (pictured here) and another where he is seen working with an array of lab flasks (the original of this second image has not yet been traced).

The COI was a government communications and marketing department (successor to the Ministry of Information) that provided publicity for other organisations in the public sector and was especially tasked with promoting British inventions and discoveries overseas.

It was after their involvement that news of a hybrid antibiotic breakthrough began to travel around the world. The COI photographs were published for the first time in January 1985 in the Arabic language press (Anwar and Amal in Beirut). Illustrated articles afterwards appeared in Trinidad, Jedda, Bogota, Montevideo, Germany, and France.

The formal announcement of the hybrid antibiotic discovery was made in Nature in April 1985 , recording the contributions of Hopwood, Malpartida, Kieser, H. Ikeda, J. Duncan, I. Fujii, B.A.M. Rudd, H.G. Floss and S. mura.

An American group, led by Professor Heinz Floss at Ohio State University, Columbus, had characterised a second hybrid antibiotic made by a strain arising when Davids group had transferred actinorhodin genes from S. coelicolor into a culture making another blue compound called dihydrogranaticin, but this did not give rise to a change in colour, so it was not so dramatic as the mederhodin case.

That 1985 landmark was the catalyst for the introduction of genetic approaches that transformed natural product chemistry (see for example, L. Katz speaking for the Society for Industrial Microbiology in 2003).

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Unnatural Natural Products the story behind a photo - The John Innes Centre

It may now be possible to reduce tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease, thanks to two new gene-editing methods developed by researchers in the U.S. The new tools could be used to further understand tick biology, and potentially alter parts of the tick genome involved in harbouring and transmitting pathogens.

Ticks are parasites that consume animal and human blood. There are 70 species found in Australia 16 of which have been reported to feed on humans. While there isnt evidence of locally acquired Lyme disease in Australia, ticks are nonetheless vectors of other bacteria which cause diseases such as Q fever, Queensland tick typhus, Flinders Island spotted fever, and Australian spotted fever.

Ticks are a formidable foe to public health, says Jason Rasgon, professor of entomology and disease epidemiology at Pennsylvania State University in the US. We are in desperate need of new tools to fight ticks and the pathogens they spread.

In the first study to demonstrate genetic modification in ticks, the team used two different protocols using the CRISPR/Cas9 system a gene-editing complex which allows the cutting of DNA at a targeted location in the genome to add or remove sequences of DNA.

This process is usually done by injecting the CRISPR/Cas9 into embryos, but until now this has been impossible to do in tick eggs due to their hard wax coating.

For many years, people thought it would be impossible to make a transgenic tick because tick eggs are coated in a hard wax that shattered the delicate glass needles used for injections, says Rasgon.

The researchers were able to circumvent this problem by removing the maternal organs that make this wax prior to the ticks laying their eggs. This resulted in eggs that could be injected with the complex to successfully make deletions in two different genes.

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Then, using a different protocol, they injected the CRISPR/Cas9 directly into pregnant adult female ticks and used a process called ReMOT Control to target the ovaries specifically. A small peptide (a short chain of amino acids) which binds to receptors on the ovaries of most insect species was fused to the Cas9, allowing the complex to be delivered into the developing ovaries to edit the genomes of the offspring.

This is the first research demonstrating that this peptide is functional in ticks.

They found when applied to a gene called ProbB, the gene-editing efficiencies of both protocols embryo injections (14%) and ReMOT Control (11.7%) were similar. Gene-editing efficiency is a measure of the extent to which the procedure alters the gene, and refers to the frequency of insertion/deletion mutations that occur.

The ReMOT Control protocol was just as efficient as embryo injection and significantly easier, says Rasgon.

In the United States, alone, ticks infect approximately 300,000 people with Lyme disease each year, and if left untreated, the infection can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system, he adds. Currently, there is no vaccine, and existing treatments are not always fully effective.

In Australia, brown dog ticks are also the vector for the deadly dog disease Ehrlichiosis. First detected in May 2020, the ticks have gone on to infect dogs in northern Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and northern South Australia.

This research, published in iScience, is particularly valuable because climate change is allowing ticks to rapidly invade new areas, and putting even more people and animals at risk of infections.

The methods can be used to develop new control methods for diseases, such as Lyme disease, and also to further understand the biology of ticks, says Rasgon.

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Decoding the dangers of ticks - Cosmos

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Plant Genomics For Oilseeds And Pulses Market : Forecast by Key Products, Types, Application, Regions and Overview of History The UB Post - The UB...

An international team led by Newcastle University has developed a species and strain database that uses cell barcodes to monitor and track engineered organisms and also molecularly link that data to the associated living samples. Supporting international collaboration CellRepro also has significant safety advantages, such as limiting the impact of deliberately or accidentally released genetically modified microorganisms by enabling faster tracing of organisms lab of origin and design details.

It is built on version control, a concept from software engineering that records and tracks changes to software code and the scientists believe this will make engineering biology more open, reproducible, easier to trace and share and more trustworthy.

Lead author Natalio Kasnogor, Professor of Computer Science and Synthetic Biology atNewcastle Universitys School of Computing, said: Engineering biology is not rocket science. It is much, much harder. And because of that it is imperative that we do it more openly and more collaboratively. CellRepo, at its core, is a collaboration platform in which cell engineers can document their work and share it with others (within their own lab or more widely). By enabling more collaboration and the seamlessly sharing of engineered strains we hope to accelerate and improve synthetic biology processes and reporting for everybody. CellRepo is a community resource and as such we invite engineering biologists, synthetic biologists, biotechnologists and life scientists more generally to try it and get in touch with us so we know what works and what needs to be improved!

Dr Jonathan Tellechea, a synthetic biologist in the project added: "I have always had some misidentification issues during my projects. Fortunately I was able to find them early on and solve them but I cant imagine how many good projects have failed or stalled because of this. Some other chunk of my time as a biologist goes into retroactively building the history of the plasmids and strains I use. I may get the genetic material from someone, but who was the original author? Sometimes I am lucky and it is just one paper away, sometimes its down a rabbit hole that may end up in the 80s. CellRepo fixes these and other important problems for experimentalists."

Study co-author, ProfessorVictor de Lorenzo from the Systems and Synthetic Biology Program at theCentro Nacional de Biotecnologia in Madrid said: As a software engineer coming from industry to academia, it has been both a challenge and pleasure to work on a project where I can use my skills for the public good. Version control is a staple of software engineering and I am proud that we are now bringing these tools to engineering biology.

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Will Global Repository for Cell Engineering improve Openness and Collaboration? - Labmate Online

Understanding how neural stem cell activity is regulated and maintained has critical implications for regenerative approaches following brain trauma and disease. Now, researchers at the University of Cologne, led by Matteo Bergami, PhD, from the CECAD Cluster of Excellence for Aging Research, have discovered that the protein YME1L is essential in coordinating the shift between cellular proliferation and quiescence.

The article, Metabolic control of adult neural stem cell self-renewal by the mitochondrial protease YME1L, was published in Cell Reports.

The transition between quiescence and activation in neural stem and progenitor cells (NSPCs) is coupled with reversible changes in energy metabolism with key implications for lifelong NSPC self-renewal and neurogenesis, the researchers wrote. How this metabolic plasticity is ensured between NSPC activity states is unclear. We find that a state-specific rewiring of the mitochondrial proteome by the i-AAA peptidase YME1L is required to preserve NSPC self-renewal.

Our results show that the activity of a single mitochondrial protease can significantly affect the fate of neural stem cells and the production rate of new nerve cells. These findings not only reveal a new layer of regulation in the biology of neural stem cells but may also have important implications for patients bearing mutated YME1L, Bergami said.

Together, our results reveal YME1L as playing a critical role in acutely shaping the mitochondrial proteome of NSPCs, adding an important layer of regulation in the mechanisms governing NSPC metabolic state transitions beyond potential changes in gene expression, concluded the researchers.

Understanding how neural stem cell activity is regulated and maintained can help pave the way for new strategies following brain trauma and disease.

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Protein behind the Fate of Neural Stem Cells and Nerve Cell Production Uncovered - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News