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posted by janrinok on Friday July 24 2015, @02:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the sobering-thought dept.

The stakes, however, have changed. Everyone at the Napa meeting had access to a gene-editing technique called Crispr-Cas9. The first term is an acronym for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," a description of the genetic basis of the method; Cas9 is the name of a protein that makes it work. Technical details aside, Crispr-Cas9 makes it easy, cheap, and fast to move genes around—any genes, in any living thing, from bacteria to people. "These are monumental moments in the history of biomedical research," Baltimore says. "They don't happen every day."

Using the three-year-old technique, researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS. Agronomists have rendered wheat invulnerable to killer fungi like powdery mildew, hinting at engineered staple crops that can feed a population of 9 billion on an ever-warmer planet. Bioengineers have used Crispr to alter the DNA of yeast so that it consumes plant matter and excretes ethanol, promising an end to reliance on petrochemicals. Startups devoted to Crispr have launched. International pharmaceutical and agricultural companies have spun up Crispr R&D. Two of the most powerful universities in the US are engaged in a vicious war over the basic patent. Depending on what kind of person you are, Crispr makes you see a gleaming world of the future, a Nobel medallion, or dollar signs.

The technique is revolutionary, and like all revolutions, it's perilous. Crispr goes well beyond anything the Asilomar conference discussed. It could at last allow genetics researchers to conjure everything anyone has ever worried they would—designer babies, invasive mutants, species-specific bioweapons, and a dozen other apocalyptic sci-fi tropes. It brings with it all-new rules for the practice of research in the life sciences. But no one knows what the rules are—or who will be the first to break them.

Finally. I've been waiting for my Four-assed monkey for years.


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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday July 24 2015, @02:55PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2015, @02:55PM (#213169) Journal

    So... why are you trying to teach us about the bacterial origins of the approach?

    What's the gain?

    I mean, those are nice articles, but help me out.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @03:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @03:13PM (#213177)

    So... why are you trying to teach us about the bacterial origins of the approach?

    What's the gain?

    I mean, those are nice articles, but help me out.

    HTH! [cc.com]

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 24 2015, @03:31PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 24 2015, @03:31PM (#213183) Journal

    CRISPR is the most important development in biotechnology. Everyone here should know more about it.

    If gene editing gets any easier and cheaper than CRISPR, you are looking at an interesting state of affairs.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @05:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @05:11PM (#213221)

      CRISPR is the most important development in biotechnology.

      Why exactly? I can't stand the layout and popups of the wired page.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 24 2015, @06:06PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 24 2015, @06:06PM (#213240) Journal

        It's a very cheap, fast, and powerful method of altering the DNA of organisms.

        Chinese Scientists Have Genetically Modified Human Embryos [soylentnews.org]
        NIH Won't Fund Human Germline Modification [soylentnews.org]
        The Rapid Rise of CRISPR [soylentnews.org]
        "Double-Muscled" Pigs Created Using Simple Gene Modification [soylentnews.org]
        Photoactivated CRISPR-Cas9 Proteins Created [soylentnews.org]
        The Bacterial Origins of the CRISPR Genome-Editing Revolution [kurzweilai.net]
        Regulate gene editing in wild animals [nature.com]
        These Superhumans Are Real and Their DNA Could be Worth Billions [soylentnews.org]

        It puts genetic experimentation within the budget of amateurs, and puts powerful gene editing in the hands of biotech companies.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:30PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:30PM (#213254)

          That's what they SAY, but I wonder how careful they are. I took a look at this paper (no idea if it is representative):
          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26121415 [nih.gov]

          My initial concern is that somehow the protocol is selecting for pre-existing variants that are missing the dna segment to begin with. What they do is treat some 10^6 cells with Cas9 and CRISPR mRNA for 3 days then use a method called TIDE (I'm not familiar with this method and it's pitfalls) to measure indel frequency. We see this method cannot detect the presence of indels at baseline below ~3.5%:

          All TIDE analyses below the detection sensitivity of 3.5% were set to 0%.

          From supplementary figure 12 of that paper we see that the number of control cells increased by ~10-100x during this period, and this was reduced in the treated cells to 3-5x. From supplementary figure 11 this does not appear to be due to greatly increased cell death, but the treatment could still be toxic. Instead suppressing proliferation of cells that contain the target sequence, leaving more food for the pre-existing cells lacking the target which would proliferate faster. The gel shown in supplementary figure 2 also shows that the "cleaved target DNA" exists in at least some of the control cells, just in lower amounts.

          I think we need to know what percent of cells already appear "modified" at the beginning of these studies. At least in this paper (which I assume uses well accepted methods) they have not accounted for this effect. Know any papers that mention this?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:50PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @06:50PM (#213269)

            Sorry, that should be ~10-20x rather than 10-100x for the proliferation and also that for this assay they used 3e4 cells. It is also interesting that proliferation appears to be so low, only a small fraction of of the cells would be dividing to get these results (you would expect N0^t cells where t is doubling times). The CellTiter-Glo 2.0 Assay they use actually measures metabolic activity rather than proliferation, but this correlates with number of cells under normal conditions.

            Maybe I didn't read the paper carefully enough, and would appreciate feedback.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:15PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @07:15PM (#213290)

              In a rush and found more errors "(you would expect N0^t cells where t is doubling times)" should be N0*2^t. So the treated cells are dividing at approximately half the rate of the controls...