What Americans Think About Gene Editing for Babies

In an article by Science News, they analyze the Pew Research Center's findings on the attitudes of Americans towards tweaking the genes of unborn babies. 72% of Americans surveyed favored changing an unborn babies' genetic makeup to treat a disease or condition that would be present at birth. On the other hand, Americans are not on board with the idea of "designer babies," with about 80% agreeing that boosting intelligence with gene-editing would be taking medical technology too far. Furthermore, 65% said they did not support gene-editing if it required experimenting on human embryos, however, experiments on embryos are already underway in Europe and China. Only time will tell how the attitude of gene-editing on babies will be in the future.

What 13,000 Patents Involving the DNA of Sea Life Tell Us About the Future

This article published by the New York Times discusses a paper from Science Advances on patents on genes of living organisms that are located in the ocean. The articles begins the discussion by introducing a recent debate in the United Nations about how the genes of many living organisms are being used and the development of a global legal framework for genetic resources. Private companies in Germany, USA, Japan, Norway, Britain, France, Denmark, Canada, Israel, and the Netherlands own 98% of the patents involving marine organisms’ DNA; and this is leaving to a new kind of global inequality. These genetic prospectors are looking for organisms with exceptional traits that provide the missing portion of a product that will hopefully develop a new or alternative treatment. After various examples, the article concludes with the experimentation of growing of Omega-3 fatty acids on land modifying genetic codes of a Canola plant with DNA from marine microorganisms. 

Ana Maria Torres Martinez

In vivo CRISPR Editing

An paper in Nature focused on the the topic of how scientists are testing in vivo CRISPR editing in mice.  In the paper the scientists wanted to test how editing genes and targeting certain genes can help stop certain mutations from forming. There has been no way to test the in vivo editing until now, in which the scientists used two types of mice to perform tests. The scientists are testing the in vivo editing on the mice livers to see if there could be any mutations that could be stopped or slowed down. As well as there was carefully designed guide RNA that were used on the livers, both of the strategies are showing some sort of positive change in the mice's gene and can help start the research for more gene editing.

The Ever-Shrinking Human Protein-Encoding Genome

A news article posted on Medical News Today on September 3rd reports on a scientific journal article written in Nucleic Acids Research, which hypothesizes that many fewer genes in the human genome code for proteins than previously thought. This process of discovering all the functional genes in the human genome began with the Human Genome project, which at the onset found approximately 40,000 functional human genes, but throughout the project decreased that number to 20-25,000. This study in Nucleic Acids Research cross-referenced three different proteome databases looking for pseudogenes that were identified as functional genes, and found substantial evidence for close to 3,000 and potentially greater than 4,000 pseudogenes. These findings provide strong data for the number of functional human genes settling below 20,000, and most likely lower than that. Fewer functional human genes means that fields such as gene therapy and biomedicine do not have to sort through pseudogenes to find genes responsible for certain human traits or disease, and therefore isolating the function of different human genes a less clunky process.

Scientists Are Retooling Bacteria to Cure Disease

An article published in The New York Times discusses a paper in Nature which recently confirmed the successful manipulation of DNA in bacteria, engineering them to treat a rare inherited disease called phenylketonuria, or PKU. This type of manipulation of DNA has been done for years but only with mice, this was the first successful try with humans. If this new bacteria continues breaking down a metabolism byproduct, an amino acid called phenylalanine, it would signify a huge change for people suffering from PKU. However, they engineered the phenylalanine genes to “shut down” if they sensed high levels of oxygen around them, this may shut the genes permanently for people who also suffer from hyperoxia (excess of oxygen in body tissues).

Alejandra Paredes

A Neanderthal - Denisovan 1st generation hybrid?

A recent article in the New York times discuss a paper/letter in Nature titled The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father. Basically, the DNA extracted from a ~90,000 year old bone from a Siberian cave seems to be part Neanderthal and part Denisovan.  If true, it's really remarkable that they happen to get a sample from a first generation hominid hybrid. But I wonder if this might be a Neanderthal sample contaminated with Denisovan DNA?

Non-potluck post: Intelligence and genetics.

The study of intelligence has previously been considered controversial, however, Plomin and von Stumm (2018) state that the scrutiny has had a positive effect on the quality of the research produced. Plomin and von Stumm (2018) suggest the use of genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS), that take into account multiple regions of variation within the genome, are beneficial as an investigative tool in understanding the genetic basis of intelligence. 

The heritability of intelligence is noted by Plomin and von Stumm (2018) to be about 50% based on previous studies, particularly those looking at twins. When specifically looking at SNPs the heritability of intelligence is stated to be around 25%, whereas GPS heritability is stated to be about 10% (Plomin and von Stumm, 2018). It is suggested by Plomin and von Stumm (2018) that the discrepancy between the heritability values for SNPs and GPS could be ameliorated through increasing the GWAS sample size as well as looking at the interaction between genes and the environment amongst other considerations.

It is also noted by Plomin and von Stumm (2018) that this particular area of research has many ethical, legal, and social considerations. Particularly the issues associated with stigmatisation, as seen in the misuse of IQ data in the 1900’s as a way of separating out individuals, as well as the potential use of biological determinism (Plomin and von Stumm, 2018).

Click here to see the article.

Third post from Nature Reviews Genetics.

References

Plomin, R., and von Stumm, S., 2018. The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Reviews Genetics. 19: 148-159.

Victoria Lockwood