SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A disputed paper that raised questions about the safety of CRISPR has been retracted:
A scientific paper that purported to lay bare serious flaws in the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR and briefly tanked shares of genome-editing companies has been retracted by its publisher.
The paper [DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4293] [DX], published last year in Nature Methods, claimed that CRISPR wreaked havoc on the genome, causing hundreds of unintended mutations in mice — and that the algorithms typically used to detect these changes were routinely missing them.
[...] Two months after publication of the paper, Nature Methods published an "an expression of concern" about the paper in July. The retraction notice, appended Friday, goes further, saying the authors did not use mice that had been bred in their own laboratory — so they could not know if any genetic mutations were the result of their intervention with CRISPR editing, or if it stemmed from variations in the mice's own genomes.
Nature Methods editorial discussing the retraction: CRISPR off-targets: a reassessment (open, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4664) (DX)
Previously: CRISPR Safer than Thought; Misleading Study Found Shared Mutations in Closely Related Mice
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @06:51PM (4 children)
Do you have any references to back up your claims or are you just assuming that you're right?
Do you actually believe that their "design was sufficient to control for genetic variation in an inbred strain"? Two of the authors agree that it wasn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:36PM (3 children)
The editing is causing a double strand break in cells that contain a target sequence. Before the hype it was always known that it would result in 3 things: necrosis/apotosis > NHEJ > HDR. Now for some reason the effects of selectively killing cells with a certain sequence is ignored.
I'm saying pretty much none* of the studies deal with this.
*There were a couple from china I read that only used a dozen or so egg cells supposedly, which is too few for there to likely be a mutant at the target site already present. Of course they could have cherry picked from a larger population...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:11PM (2 children)
"would result in 3 things: necrosis/apotosis > NHEJ > HDR"
There needs to be extensive DNA damage that doesn't get resolved in order for a cell to die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:41PM
It should be necrosis/apotosis/senescence. If the lineage stops dividing it may as well be dead for these purposes since by the time they measure it those cells will be gone or an irrelevant proportion. Also cas-9 does lead to extensive cell death according to pretty much every paper that reports on it. Looks like this is one of those papers that doesn't. They just tell us the results of the ones that survived:
If there is a specific paper you care about I'll be glad to check for you, but don't feel like digging through the literature again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:44PM
Also, you can look through my comment history on this site to see some examples where I point it out. I've done it for quite a few "gene editing" articles so if you just look at those and search for "selection" or "cell death" or "toxicity" or "dsb", etc I'm sure you can find some quite quickly.