Category Archives: DNA

It's now cheaper than ever to map the human genome. But most healthy people don't seem to care all that much about their DNA.

A startup called Helix is trying to change that. The company launches this month with more than a dozen genetic tests in categories ranging from health to entertainment.

Bay Area-based Helix is a spinout of Illumina, a biotech company that develops DNA sequencing machines. Helix's mission is to make genomics relevant to millions more people than have used services like 23andMe, or have taken genetic tests for medical reasons.

It is hoping to reach that broader audience by partnering with a variety of brands that use genetic data in their marketing campaigns.

Examples of apps on Helix's e-commerce store include EverlyWell's "Breast Milk DHA+", which offers new moms the opportunity to find out about the DHA in their breast milk, and Dot One's "personalized scarf," which puts the pattern of a user's genetic code into a scarf. The company also offers health applications, like an inherited diabetes and cholesterol test, and its other categories are fitness, entertainment, nutrition, and ancestry.

The goal for Helix is to reach a new user-base who might not be aware of genetics or are fearful of the consequences of sharing their sensitive health data with companies (there are some gaps in the laws that protect people from discrimination based on their genetics). To convince these people, Thurston said, "utility must surpass fear." In other words, these tests need to be useful or entertaining enough to convince users to give Helix a shot.

Helix is positioning itself as an "app store," because takes on the task of sequencing a users' DNA in its San Diego lab then curates the apps that can take advantage of that information. Helix provides exome sequencing, which is more extensive than "genotyping" services offered by 23andMe, Ancestry.com and the like.

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Start-up Helix wants you to care about your DNA -- and it's enlisting help from marketers - CNBC

Tanya Eiserer, WFAA 10:29 PM. CDT August 01, 2017

Wendy Birdsall (Photo: WFAA)

Wendy Birdsall has survived so much.

Homelessness. Crack addiction. Run-ins with the law. Being raped 11 years go.

They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, says Birdsall, 43.

Clean now for seven years and attending Southern Methodist University, Birdsall hadn't thought of that rape in years. Last month, she came home to find a card on her door telling her to call an investigator. She thought at first perhaps something from her past had come back to haunt her.

When she finally met with the investigator, she learned that police had a suspect in her rape. His name is Roy Gutierrez, a suspect in a series of attacks dating back more than a decade.

I was really shocked that they found the guy, she says.

When she saw his picture, she says knew it was the man who attacked her the same man accused of raping a young woman behind a building on the edge of Deep Ellum in June.

All these years, I had no idea what his name was, she says.

Roy Gutierrez is a suspect in a series of attacks dating back more than a decade. (Photo: WFAA)

Seeing his picture took her back to a dark traumatic place in her life. What really upsets her is to find that his DNA had been matched to her case nearly two years after her attack. She did not know about the DNA match until last month.

It's not clear why the case wasn't filed against him at the time.

Part of me is angry, really angry, she says.

The only explanation shes received so far is that there are cracks in the criminal justice system. That is hardly a comfort to victims.

Every single girl after that that was a victim, did not have to be a victim, she says.

A recent search of police records revealed that Gutierrez had been suspected in seven rapes between 2004 and 2007, according to court documents.

Gutierrez is currently in the Dallas County jail. He is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault one for the Deep Ellum case and the other for Birdsalls case.

On that night in November 2006, Birdsall and her boyfriend got into an argument outside. A white car pulled up. The man inside asked, Hey are you alright? You need me to take you somewhere.

Birdsdall says she was so mad at her boyfriend that she got in the car. Before she knew it, the man was driving to a place way out of the area.

I knew in the pit of my stomach something was wrong, she says. At that time, I was not a Christian. I started praying to God, If youre real, help me.'

The man pulled into a wooded area. He raped her at gunpoint in the car. He ordered her out of the vehicle and raped her again. When he turned his back to retrieve his gun, she ran as fast as she could. He fired his gun at her at least twice.

I kept running, Birdsall said. I was so terrified.

She ran to several houses, but no one would answer. She heard a car and knew it had to be her attacker, so she jumped a 10-foot fence. The homeowner came out and called the police.

The next year, in 2007, Gutierrez was identified as a potential suspect in a series of attacks that had occurred over a two-year period, according to 2007 police report.

There had been several rapes involving a Hispanic male in a small silver car. In each case, the rapist had picked up the victims and taken them to same wooded area.

On Sept. 21, 2007, an officer drove to that area in the early morning hours, looking for possible victims. When he got there, he saw a vehicle matching the suspects vehicle description.

The officer saw Gutierrez getting out of the car. The officer saw an undressed woman in the back seat.

She told police that she had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend in East Dallas and that she had packed her clothing when he drove up and offered her a ride.

She told police that he drove her to a wooded area and tried to rip her dress off, saying, It goes off like this.

She told police that he threatened to stab her and raped her, saying, You like this, dont you.

Gutierrez was arrested at the scene. He was charged with aggravated sexual assault. He pleaded guilty in a plea deal to aggravated assault.

He violated probation and served five years in prison. Gutierrez was released in 2014.

Birdsall says it took years for her to understand that the rape was not her fault. She says she plans to testify against him to make sure he cant do it to anyone else. She says she forgave him for what he did, not for him, but for herself.

I am a survivor, she says. Im not a victim. Im an overcomer.

A one-time high school dropout, she graduated from El Centro with honors. She celebrated seven years drug-free last week.

Shes scheduled to graduate next year with degrees in applied psychology and health management.

My life is a walking testimony, she says. I know for a fact that somebody upstairs loves me.

2017 WFAA-TV

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Rape survivor upset about lengthy delay after DNA matches suspect - WFAA

DNA evidence further vindicates...

YAKIMA, Wash. - A Yakima rape victim could be another step closer to finding justice, thanks to a man who was wrongfully convicted of attacking her more than 20 years ago. Ted Bradford was convicted of rape in the late 1990's. He confessed to the crime during an interrogation because he wanted to end the questioning and he thought biological evidence would exonerate him. But, at the time, crime labs couldn't test a DNA sample that small and a jury convicted Bradford of rape. After he served his sentence, the Pacific Northwest chapter of The Innocence Project took up his case. They had DNA evidence tested and it did not match Bradford. Still, the DNA was not matched to a suspect... until now. KXLY4 News profiled Bradford in a special report about the Innocence Project in 2016. Bradford told us of his ongoing litigation against the Yakima Police investigator who handled his case. That civil case was thrown out, but is under review by the U.S. Court of Appeals.His attorneys in that caseused that DNA sample to help find who they believe is the real suspect. The attorneys narrowed down a list of possible suspects to a family member of the victim. They then hired a private investigator who collected a DNA sample from the man's trash. That sample was tested at a private lab and the results came back this summer. According to a news release issued Monday, "[the DNA sample] was compared to the DNA sample collected from items the rapist left at the scene. The lab results demonstrated that the two samples had a nearly 100 percent probability of having originated from the same person." "The news was overwhelming," said Jackie McMutrie, founder of Innocence Project Northwest. "It is a tragedy that more reliable police practices and a thorough investigation could have prevented the heartbreaking losses suffered by Ted and his family." The attorneys brought their information to the Yakima Police Department, the Yakima Prosecuting Attorney and the State Attorney General. It's up to the prosecutor now to determine if new charges will be filed. The prosecutor told the Seattle Times that it's not clear yet if they'll do that. The Times said the statute of limitations on the crime expires next year. "I cannot express my gratitude to [civil attorney] Mike [Wampold] and the rest of his team, and the living, breathing saints at the Innocence Project Northwest," Bradford said. "They've worked for years to help me win my freedom. Now through Mike Wompold's dogged determination, we know who the bad guy is and we hope he will be held accountable for his horrible crime." For more information about the case, visit http://www.justiceforted.com.

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DNA evidence further vindicates previously exonerated man - KXLY Spokane

August 1, 2017 Illustrations of double-stranded DNA, RNA and a wormlike bead chain model.The radial distribution of the end-to-end distance, Ree, and contour length, L, are shown. Credit: Xi Zhang/Bao/Wu/Zhu/Tan

Unlike the rigid plastic models from chemistry class, real chains of molecules can bend and stretch, like beads on an elastic cord. Some polymers, like DNA, are especially stretchy, a characteristic that can complicate attempts to model their behavior.

Since the seminal work of Paul Flory, researchers have developed a variety of formulas for calculating distance between the ends of a curved polymer. However, these formulas have typically failed to consider the stretchiness of the molecule. In a new study, published this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics, scientists have derived a formula to determine the end-to-end distance of a semiflexible polymer, including DNA or RNA, while taking into account how much the polymer stretches.

Previous estimates of how polymers bend did not account for how the molecule moves in three dimensions. "This method to calculate the contour length distribution is more rigorous," said Xi Zhang from Wuhan University and lead author of the paper. "Not only can we calculate the end-to-end distance, we can also figure out the shape of the polymer."

By including the stretchiness of the polymer, the new formula can help researchers estimate the flexibility of segments of DNA, a property known to be essential to its biological function. DNA's flexibility impacts the binding of regulatory proteins and how the DNA wraps around histones, proteins that act like spools to keep DNA neatly packaged inside a nucleus. The specific ways that DNA bends and wraps around histones can affect gene expression by exposing certain genes to the outside, while others remain tucked away.

The researchers built on the foundation of the wormlike chain model, which treats semiflexible polymers like DNA and RNA as links in a chain. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulations, they validated their formula over a wide range of values for stretchiness and flexibility. They also used molecular dynamics simulations, which model how molecules move and interact in time, to ensure that they obtained similar results from their method for short DNA and RNA polymers.

This type of formula is more computationally efficient than using computer simulations to determine the end-to-end distance of stretchy, bending polymers, and, in seconds, can calculate results that could take weeks of simulations.

The new formula is especially useful for estimating the end-to-end length distribution of small polymers, the authors point out. "This stretching is really important in a biopolymer when it's really short, say 40 base pairs," Zhang said. They calculate that the effect of the stretching becomes negligible for DNA molecules longer than about 130 base pairs, and for RNAs longer than about 240 base pairs.

Explore further: Estimating the glass transition temperature for polymers in 'confined geometries'

More information: "Radial distribution function of semiflexible oligomers with stretching flexibility," Xi Zhang, Lei Bao, Yuan-Yan Wu, Xiao-Long Zhu and Zhi-Jie Tan, Journal of Chemical Physics August 1, 2017 aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4991689.

Polymers are used for myriad applications today, and perhaps the most important property that dictates which polymer is chosen for a given application is its "glass transition temperature." Many industrial polymers possess ...

Theoretical physicists led by Professor Kurt Binder and Dr. Arash Nikoubashman at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany have used computer simulations to study the arrangement of stiff polymers in spherical ...

Scientists use simulations to test the limits of their object of studyin this case thin films of polymersto extremes of scale. In a study about to be published in the European Physical Journal E, Nava Schulmann, a researcher ...

All polymers have a distinctive degree of elasticityhow much they will stretch when a force is applied. However, for the past 100 years, polymer scientists have been stymied in their efforts to predict polymers' elasticity, ...

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(Phys.org)One of the most puzzling things about evolution is that, even after 4 billion years, it hasn't stopped. Instead of culminating in a single best adapted species, today the Earth contains an estimated 8.7 million ...

Unlike the rigid plastic models from chemistry class, real chains of molecules can bend and stretch, like beads on an elastic cord. Some polymers, like DNA, are especially stretchy, a characteristic that can complicate attempts ...

By some estimates, bacterial strains resistant to antibioticsso-called superbugs - will cause more deaths than cancer by 2050.

A chemical process that allows color images to be printed on specially coated paper and then erased so that different images can be printed on the same paper has been developed by researchers at Rice, Yonsei and Korea universities.

Jean-Sabin McEwen knocks out a web search for "North Dakota," "night sky" and "flaring," and quickly finds a picture from space showing a glowing cluster bigger than Minneapolis. It's from oil and gas fields burning off methane, ...

Two new discoveries from Edward Yu's Iowa State University laboratory are adding to the scientific understanding of how bacteria resist antibiotics.

Scientists at Rice University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have predicted and created new two-dimensional electrocatalysts to extract hydrogen from water with high performance and low cost.

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New theory of polymer length provides improved estimates of DNA and RNA size - Phys.Org

DNA research is shining new light on the Biblical Canaanite civilization, which existed thousands of years ago in the Middle East.

The ancient civilization, which created the first alphabet and is mentioned frequently in the Bible, has long fascinated historians. LiveScience reports that, because the Canaanites kept their records on papyrus, rather than clay, relatively little is known about them.

Now, however, scientists have found a genetic trail back to the Canaanites ancient world.

EXPERTS HUNT FOR BIBLICAL TABERNACLE THAT HOUSED THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

By sequencing the genomes of five Canaanites that lived 4,000 years ago with genomes from 99 people living in modern day Lebanon, researchers identified a strong genetic link to the mysterious civilization.

The results surprised the scientists, whose work was supported by U.K. biomedical research charity The Wellcome Trust.

"In light of the enormously complex history of this region in the last few millennia, it was quite surprising that over 90 percent of the genetic ancestry of present-day Lebanese was derived from the Canaanites," said Chris Tyler-Smith, senior group leader at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in a statement.

EXPERTS UNCOVER EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT JERUSALEMS DESTRUCTION BY THE BABYLONIANS

In addition to the ancient Canaanite DNA, the analysis of genomes from the modern day Lebanese people also showed a small proportion of Eurasian ancestry that may have come from conquests by Assyrians, Persians or Macedonians, according to the experts.

The researchers also discovered that the ancient Canaanites were a mixture of local people, who settled in farming villages during the Neolithic period, and eastern migrants who arrived about 5,000 years ago. Using ancient DNA we show for the first time who were (genetically) the ancient Canaanites, how they were related to other ancient populations and what was their fate, explained Marc Haber, a genetic data expert at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in an email to Fox News. Our work shows the power of genetics in filling gaps in human history when the historical records are absent or scarce.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNEARTH 2,700-YEAR OLD RESERVOIR IN ISRAEL

Haber added that the results complement Biblical accounts of the Canaanites. While the Israelites are commanded to utterly destroy the Canaanites in Deuteronomy 20:16-18, Judges 1 describes the survival of a number of Canaanite communities.

Canaanites once lived in what we now recognize as Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The remains of the five ancient Canaanites studied as part of the DNA research were recovered in the modern-day Lebanese city of Sidon.

The research was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics on July 27.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

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DNA discovery identifies living descendants of Biblical Canaanites ... - Fox News

Sen. Bernie Sanders / Getty Images

BY: Paul Crookston August 1, 2017 8:36 am

Comedian Larry David's impression of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) became a "Saturday Night Live" favorite during the presidential primary, and now a DNA test shows there's more than just a resemblance between the two.

David and Sanders share identical DNA in three chromosomes, which led Henry Louis Gates Jr. of PBS's "Finding Your Roots" to conclude that they are related, the Associated Pressreports. The show explores American history by examining the lives and even DNA of celebrity guests, and the episode that revealedthe two men are related will air in October.

"I was very happy about that," David said on a tour promoting the return of his show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. "I thought there must have been some connection."

Gates said that they "couldn't have scripted" the discovery. David revealed last week to critics that he just learned he was Sanders' "third cousin or something."

Both men are Jewish and grew up in Brooklyn around the same time, where they developed similar accents. David said he had an easy time learning to "talk like Bernie" as he developedthe impression that became a staple on "Saturday Night Live."

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DNA Test Finds Bernie Sanders and Larry David Are Related - Washington Free Beacon

The vacant South Works site runs from 79th Street to the Calumet River along the lakefront. View Full Caption

Bing

SOUTH CHICAGO U.S. Steel has reached a deal to sell the 440-acre South Works site along the city's south lakefront, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced.

Emerald Living will buy the land with views of the Chicago skyline from U.S. Steel and build a mixed-use development that will include up to 20,000 housing units, Emanuel said.

The partnership, which brings together the WELink Group of Hong Kong and Barcelona Housing Systems of Barcelona to build environmentally friendly modular housing, now starts a five-month review of the site and terms of the deal before final closing.

This agreement is a major milestone towards converting an unused stretch of land that represents Chicagos industrial past into a vibrant community that will contribute to Chicagos economic, cultural and recreational future, Emanuel said in his announcement. I look forward to seeing the communitys dynamic vision for this site become a reality."

The two companies were rumored to be close to a deal forthe site that stretches from79th Street to the Calumet River east of Lake Shore Drive as early as January.

We are excited by the tremendous opportunity available at the South Works site and look forward to working throughout this due diligence period to determine the best path forward, said Barry ONeill, CEO of Emerald Living.

Over the coming months, we will be working with the city, Aldermen [Susan]Sadlowski Garza and [Greg] Mitchell, local community membersand other stakeholders to develop a new, exciting vision for this site and the surrounding South Chicago neighborhoods.

The master plan that the groups released in January proposed a series of low-rise apartment buildings mixed with retail and commercial space alongside amenities like a new harbor.

The group is currently involved in similar projects in Chile andCroatia and a $1.3 billion project in Spain for 8,000 housing units, with the first 4,000 expected to be completed in 2018, a little more than two years after the project was announced.

This technology provides an industrial platform for large-scale housing construction, enabling rapid site assembly with high-quality materials, while promoting green technology, environmental sustainability, and community living, said Cesar Ramirez Martinell, founder of Barcelona Housing Systems.

The South Works project would appear to be the first project in the United States for the group.

Foreign developers have been tripped up by Chicago's planning process in the past and the South Works site will also have to contend with organized groups calling for a community benefits agreement before any construction starts.

Word of the sale comes almost exactly a year after U.S. Steel put the property up for sale afterdeciding it didnt want to be a direct partner in the developing the property. There was speculation over the last year that the property had become too big for a single development and would be split up.

But in January, developers were back proposing mega-developments for the site, including a partnership between Spanish and Chinese firms proposing modular 12,000 modular houses.

Ald. Greg Mitchell said the project could be a catalyst to spark growth across the 7th ward.

"After hours of meetings, prudenceand due diligence, we are close to completing this important first step, Mitchell said.I'm looking forward to continuing the progress and bringing much needed investment and development to my community."

Ald. SadlowskiGarza (10th) represents the southern half of the site.

The hard working men and women who were once employed on this property helped produce the steel you see everyday in the City of Chicago, Garza said. This is an opportunity to restore that sense of pride and show off the beautiful lakefront on the southeast side to the rest of the city and the world.

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20000 Homes Planned For Huge Vacant US Steel Site As New Buyer Emerges - DNAinfo

My oldest brother Orvis recently submitted his DNA to Mountain View personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe. Hed been interested in finding out details of his genealogy for some time and finally bit the bullet.

Orvis submitted his saliva samples and got his results back in about six weeks. The cool thing is that he got a special deal where the regular $100 price was reduced to $80. The cooler thing is that brothers unless they are identical twins share 50 percent of the same DNA. Thats close enough for me to pay $0 and get a column out of it.

Here are Orviss test results:

Sub-Saharan African 72.7%European 23.4%East Asian & Native American 2.9%South Asian 0.5%Unassigned 0.6%

The fact that our ancestors were from Africa is not a surprise. The website breaks it down further. The lions share (68.9 percent) of our distant relatives came from West Africa. This is what the website says: Expanding from Senegal to Nigeria, West Africa composes about a fifth of the African continent. West Africans have a long shared history, and were united by large empires such as the Ghana Empire, dating as far back as the eighth century AD.

The great thing about the DNA results is that they can be combined with another chunk of information we already had, a 20-page document called The Wade Genealogy. I got it from a Texas Landman (an intermediary for an energy company) in 2010 whod used it to find me because of a parcel of land in the Lone Star state my late father had owned. Most of its information came from a file in (where else?) Salt Lake City called the wills of San Augustine (Texas, where both my parents were born and grew up).

The first part of the genealogy is rather detailed and the second part is less so, but lists six generations of my family. The names are just that to me, names, but then suddenly there is my grandfather whom I never met, Booker T. Wade. He married Corine Dennis and then it lists their children including my dad, Orvis T. Wade Sr.

I wish I knew more of my relatives, but I dont. One name that jumped out from the document was Carla Nicole Wade, my cousin, whom I know from Facebook.

The first time I saw the names of my brothers and myself in the document it was sort of like the part in the book Roots where Alex Haley changes the tense of the narrative as he entered into the history of his own book. The genealogy has errors and omissions. My youngest brother Scott was not listed and Kelvins name was misspelled as Kevin the story of his life.

I wrote a column about the genealogy in 2010 and here is a part:

My great-great-grandmothers name was . . . wait for it . . . Anarchy. Seriously. Ned and Anarchy Wade were listed together in the 1870 census. Her name sounds like a Marvel Comics Super Villain.

Ned and Anarchy had been the property of a man named Edward Teal and when he died in 1858 he left no will so the courts had to settle the estate. This is what it says in the genealogy:

The appointed commissioners of the courts ordered that the heirs of the estate separate the Negro property into two lots, 1 & 2, and place them in a hat and draw, and whichever one drew that lot would own those Negroes.

That is still horrifying for me to actually picture happening, but it did.

Orvis DNA test results showing our mixed heritage is boosted by the Wade Genealogy. In it, Ned was described as a Negro man of yellow complexion. Ned, Anarchy and their childrens race was listed as mulatto, meaning one-half negro blood.

The .6 percent unassigned made me scratch my head. Pod people? Borg? 23andMes explanation: There is a wide range of human diversity and sometimes our algorithm is unable to assign a region of DNA to a specific population. As we collect more data and update our algorithm, we expect that the amount of unassigned ancestry will decrease.

The ancestry DNA thing is very interesting and informative and I recommend that everyone have their sibling pay for it and then check out the results.

Reach Fairfield writer Tony Wade at toekneeweighed@gmail.com.

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Wade genealogy info boosted by DNA test - Fairfield Daily Republic

Scientists are working to create yeast that operates with custom-made DNA.

They have long been able to make specific changes in an organism's DNA. Now, they're pushing into the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned versions from scratch.

Their work is part of a bold and controversial pursuit aimed at creating custom-made DNA codes to be inserted into living cells to change how they function, or even provide treatments for diseases. It could also someday help give scientists the profound and unsettling ability to create entirely new organisms.

The genetic code is like a book written with an alphabet of only four letters: A, C, G, and T. Chemical building blocks that correspond to these letters line up in DNA molecules like links in a chain; genes are made up of specific sequences of those building blocks. These sequences tell the yeast cell how to build particular proteins.

The complete DNA code for yeast, called its genome, contains about 12 million letters. An international scientific team aims to add, delete or alter about a million of the DNA letters.

Yeast DNA is spread across 16 large chunks called chromosomes, which were parceled out among the team's labs to tackle.

So how do you redesign and build a chromosome? We asked Leslie Mitchell, a researcher at New York University. She created a 240,000-letter synthetic yeast chromosome, starting while she was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Here's the recipe:

1. On a computer, start with the natural DNA sequence of the letters across a chromosome.

2. Tell the computer to make specific alterations, such as:

Every time it sees the letter series TAG at the end of a gene, change it to TAA. Both triplets deliver the same message to the yeast's machinery for making protein, so the change doesn't affect the yeast. But the TAG triplet could be used in a different place to make the yeast produce a protein from building blocks not found in nature, for example.

Delete a class of genes called 'tRNA genes' from their normal positions, where they can impair the process of duplicating the genome before a yeast cell divides. These genes will be relocated to their own, new chromosome, where they can do their jobs without causing trouble.

Insert bits of DNA code that will let researchers rearrange the order of genes on the chromosomes, like shuffling a deck of cards. This way, scientists can experiment with many different reshufflings to see which one makes yeast grow best, or perform best in some other way.

3. Once the alterations are done, break the redesigned code into lengths of about 10,000 letters apiece and have a company create chunks of DNA that reflect each of these segments. Chunks of that size can be easily manipulated in a laboratory.

4. In the test tube, use a chemical reaction to glue three to six of these chunks together into a "megachunk."

5. Take ordinary yeast and use this 30,000-60,000-letter megachunk to replace the corresponding segment of natural DNA. Yeast will do this without much coaxing.

6. If the yeast doesn't grow normally, identify and fix the problem in the megachunk. This is called debugging. If it's fine, add the next megachunk.

7. Repeat steps 4-6 until the entire chromosome has been replaced with megachunks of synthetic DNA.

Mitchell said it took her a couple months to build her chromosome but longer to debug. "The tiniest change in the code can have dramatic effect on growth," she said. "We are learning new rules about how cells operate by building from scratch."

Follow Malcolm Ritter at http://twitter.com/malcolmritter His recent work can be found at http://tinyurl.com/RitterAP

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How scientists redesign DNA codes - ABC News

(for more about Power Words, clickhere)

audioHaving to do with sound.

bacterialHaving to do with bacteria, single-celled organisms. These dwell nearly everywhere on Earth, from the bottom of the sea to inside animals.

bit(in computer science) The term is short for binary digit. It has a value of either 0 or 1.

code(in computing) To use special language to write or revise a program that makes a computer do something.

colleagueSomeone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.

CRISPRAn abbreviation pronounced crisper for the term clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. These are pieces of RNA, an information-carrying molecule. They are copied from the genetic material of viruses that infect bacteria. When a bacterium encounters a virus that it was previously exposed to, it produces an RNA copy of the CRISPR that contains that virus genetic information. The RNA then guides an enzyme, called Cas9, to cut up the virus and make it harmless. Scientists are now building their own versions of CRISPR RNAs. These lab-made RNAs guide the enzyme to cut specific genes in other organisms. Scientists use them, like a genetic scissors, to edit or alter specific genes so that they can then study how the gene works, repair damage to broken genes, insert new genes or disable harmful ones.

dataFacts and/or statistics collected together for analysis but not necessarily organized in a way that gives them meaning. For digital information (the type stored by computers), those data typically are numbers stored in a binary code, portrayed as strings of zeros and ones.

DNA(short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, double-stranded and spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. It is built on a backbone of phosphorus, oxygen, and carbon atoms. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make.

E. coli(short for Escherichia coli) A common bacterium that researchers often harness to study genetics. Some naturally occurring strains of this microbe cause disease, but many othersdo not.

gene(adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for a cells production of a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.

geneticHaving to do with chromosomes, DNA and the genes contained within DNA. The field of science dealing with these biological instructions is known as genetics. People who work in this field are geneticists.

GIF (short for Graphics Interchange Format) This is a format used to send images, especially movies, on the internet. An animated GIF file is one that can move on the internet, such as a swirling flag or jumping frog.

moleculeAn electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).

nucleotidesThe four chemicals that, like rungs on a ladder, link up the two strands that make up DNA. They are: A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine). A links with T, and C links with G, to form DNA. In RNA, uracil takes the place of thymine.

organismAny living thing, from elephants and plants to bacteria and other types of single-celled life.

pixelShort for picture element . A tiny area of illumination on a computer screen, or a dot on a printed page, usually placed in an array to form a digital image. Photographs are made of thousands of pixels, each of different brightness and color, and each too small to be seen unless the image is magnified.

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Scientists hide a real movie within a germ's DNA - Science News for Students