Scientist take key step toward 'in body' gene editing (advance, virus, reader)

[the tiger]

Woah.
https://www.pressreader.com/

[thecoalman]

This will cause chaos in sports competition. Mark Phelps has a condition where his body produces half the lactic acid than other swimmers of his stature. Lactic acid builds in muscles during exertion and causing soreness and weakness, it's the bodies defense against overexertion. This gives Phelps a huge advantage over other swimmers and there is no way for other swimmers to compensate for it. Just to be clear I'm suggesting his achievements need an asterisk.



The issue is in the future how does one tell if this or something else that gives an athlete an advantage wasn't edited in or naturally occurring?

[Matadora]

Gene editing is not as advanced as these stories tend to portray.

AP Exclusive: US scientists try 1st gene editing in the body

First US attempt to cure a rare disease with genome editing fails miserably

[cjseliga]

Originally Posted by Matadora

Gene editing is not as advanced as these stories tend to portray.

I work in research (make viruses) and we have an entire CRISPR library for the human genome. I think it cost us $100k with shipping and tax. In theory it sounds great, just cut out the "defective" gene, but there's so much unknown on what effect it will/could have on the rest of the person/animal/cell.

We sell individual vectors to researchers doing all sorts of stuff, mostly cancer related and they are just doing in vitro (within cells) stuff and it works great. Taking that next step is the tricky part. Most researchers we deal with use it as a "knockout" and are going gene by gene to see what happens to the cancer cell by turning off a specific gene, it's very laborious and time consuming, but the CRISPR does allow them to speed up the process. In the past, it could take them 6 months to create a knockout, now they just order whatever vector they need for that specific gene and I can have it to them in 30 hours and away they go.

So the company we bought our library from, basically took the entire human genome and divided it up into segments representing every gene. The library is actually made up of gRNA (guide RNA) which corresponds to a specific DNA sequence in the genome. They estimate the human has maybe 20,000 genes and the way the library is created, it's not perfect, so there is overlap and they tried to create at least 3 vectors per gene. So that's why the library consists of, I think, 650 or so 96-well plates (62,400 wells total), with each vector (representing a certain gene or part of gene) frozen in an E. coli stock in every well.

The so-called "magic" of the system is the Cas9 protein, which takes the gRNA in each vector and will find that location it matches on the DNA by unzipping it and will make a cut on one end and the other end and remove that segment. The researchers that discovered this actually found it as a defense mechanism used by bacteria against bacteriophages (viruses that only infect bacteria or archea).

There's some amazing videos on YouTube that explain the CRISPR process and even dumb it down for the non-scientific. There was a huge patent lawsuit of UC Berkeley vs. the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over who "discovered" CRISPR first.

Broad Institute Fends off CRISPR Patent Lawsuit, at Least for Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pp17E4E-O8