Lifeboat Foundation

CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary tool in part because of its versatility: created by bacteria to chew up viruses, it works equally well in human cells to do all sorts of genetic tricks, including cutting and pasting DNA, making pinpoint mutations and activating or inactivating a gene.

Gene editing is one of the most promising new approaches to treating human diseases today.

It also raises “enormous” ethical questions, Bill Gates recently warned, and “could make inequity worse, especially if it is available only for wealthy people.”

“I am surprised that these issues haven’t generated more attention from the general public,” he said in a December blog post, adding that “this might be the most important public debate we haven’t been having widely enough.”

Continue reading “Bill Gates warns that nobody is paying attention to this state-of-the-art scientific technology that could make inequality even worse” »

Spicy food is popular the world over, but the active ingredient that makes food taste “hot”—capsaicinoids, a group of chemical compounds has useful properties beyond making food taste delicious. However, the plants that make them (the chili pepper family, or Capsicum) are small and have relatively low yields. A new paper published today in the journal Trends in Plant Science proposes an alternative: engineering tomato plants to produce capsaicinoids. If all goes well, someday, you could enjoy a spicy tomato, or even be treated with capsaicinoids extracted from one.

The paper, written by a group at Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa, builds on recent work that showed the tomato has all the genetic information it needs to produce capsaicinoids. “We know that all the genes are there, but in the tomato they are silent,” study author Agustin Zsӧgӧn says. His paper proposes a method for using gene-editing techniques to activate the genetic machinery in the tomato that tells it how to produce capsaicinoids, transforming the plant into both a “biofactory” that could produce larger amounts of the chemicals than it’s currently possible to grow and a spicy snack.

Tomatoes have capsaicinoid genetic pathways like peppers because the two South American plants are related. “In our lab, we work with both species,” Zsӧgӧn says. Last year, his team used gene editing to “domesticate” a wild tomato in just a few generations, engineering the strain to produce larger fruit, and greater quantities of it, than in the wild. This kind of process is how we ended up with the crops we eat today—early farmers planted the offspring of the most fruitful plants of each generation, enabling their genetic survival. CRISPR-Cas9 is just a shortcut.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans say it would be OK to use gene-editing technology to create babies protected against a variety of diseases — but a new poll shows they’d draw the line at changing DNA so children are born smarter, faster or taller.

A month after startling claims of the births of the world’s first gene-edited babies in China, the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds people are torn between the medical promise of a technology powerful enough to alter human heredity and concerns over whether it will be used ethically.

Jaron Keener, a 31-year-old exhibit designer at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said he’s opposed to “rich people being able to create designer babies.”

Thanks to Authority Magazine and Fotis Georgiadis for the interview — Bioquark inc. (http://www.bioquark.com) — Regeneration, Disease Reversion, Age Rejuvenation — https://medium.com/authority-magazine/the-future-is-now-we-a…cc6dc8ebf1

Histology is used to identify structural details of tissue at the microscale in the pathology lab, but analyses remain two-dimensional (2D) as they are limited to the same plane. Nondestructive 3D technologies including X-ray micro and nano-computed tomography (nanoCT) have proven validity to understand anatomical structures, since they allow arbitrary viewing angles and 3D structural detail. However, low attenuation of soft tissue has hampered their application in the field of 3D virtual histology. In a recent study, now published on Scientific Reports, Mark Müller and colleagues at the Department of Physics and Bioengineering have developed a hematein-based X-ray staining method to specifically target cell nuclei, followed by demonstrations on a whole liver lobule of a mouse.

CRISPR looks set to be the future of gene editing. But experts are cautioning that this revolutionary technique needs to be developed carefully. So what do the next few years hold?

New program coming on-line at Bioquark Inc. (www.bioquark.com) — Ectocrine interactions (the“Ectocrinome”) represents a completely unexplored area related to human health

https://www.prweb.com/releases/bioquark_inc_and_ectocrine_te…004155.htm

Today, the application of engineering methodologies to the rational modification of organisms is a persistent goal of synthetic biology. Most synthetic biologists describe biological engineering as a hierarchy, wherein parts (genes, DNA) are used to build devices (many genes together), which in turn can be used to construct systems (a series of many devices). The challenge in transforming synthetic biology into a true engineering discipline is that the parts, which are the rudimentary building blocks of higher-order constructions, are fundamentally limited by the rigor of their characterization. This is really the case in all established engineering disciplines. In electrical engineering, for instance, the baseline components (transistors, resistors, wires, etc.) have been characterized so well that children can use them and the resulting circuits behave as expected. Once all ‘parts’ are standardized, it may be possible for synthetic biologists to use individual DNA building blocks to construct entirely synthetic life forms from the bottom-up.