The approach is generic enough that you could theoretically apply it to other flowering plants. Blue roses, anyone? There are broader possibilities, too. While the exact techniques clearly won't translate to other lifeforms, this might hint at what's required to produce blue eyes or feathers. And these color changes would be useful for more than just cosmetics. Pollinating insects tend to prefer blue, so this could help spread plant life that has trouble competing in a given habitat.

Just don't count on picking up a blue bouquet. You need a permit to sell any genetically modified organism in the US, and there's a real concern that these gene-modified flowers might spread and create havoc in local ecosystems. The research team hopes to make tweaked chrysanthemums that don't breed, but that also means you're unlikely to see them widely distributed even if they do move beyond the lab. Any public availability would likely hinge on a careful understanding of the flowers' long-term impact.

See original here:

Genetic engineering creates an unnaturally blue flower - Engadget

Naonobu Noda/NARO

Giving chrysanthemums the blues was easier than researchers thought it would be.

Roses are red, but science could someday turn them blue. Thats one of the possible future applications of a technique researchers have used to genetically engineer blue chrysanthemums for the first time.

Chyrsanthemums come in an array of colours, including pink, yellow and red. But all it took to engineer the truly blue hue and not a violet or bluish colour was tinkering with two genes, scientists report in a study published on 26 July in Science Advances1. The team says that the approach could be applied to other commercially important flowers, including carnations and lilies.

Consumers love novelty, says Nick Albert, a plant biologist at the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand. And people actively seek out plants with blue flowers to fill their gardens.

Plenty of flowers are bluish, but its rare to find true blue in nature, says Naonobu Noda, a plant researcher at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization near Tsukuba, Japan, and lead study author. Scientists, including Noda, have tried to artificially produce blue blooms for years: efforts that have often produced violet or bluish hues in flowers such as roses and carnations. Part of the problem is that naturally blue blossoming plants arent closely related enough to commercially important flowers for traditional methods including selective breeding to work.

Most truly blue blossoms overexpress genes that trigger the production of pigments called delphinidin-based anthocyanins. The trick to getting blue flowers in species that arent naturally that colour is inserting the right combination of genes into their genomes. Noda came close in a 2013 study2 when he and his colleagues found that adding a gene from a naturally blue Canterbury bells flower (Campanula medium) into the DNA of chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium) produced a violet-hued bloom.

Noda says he and his team expected that they would need to manipulate many more genes to get the blue chrysanthemum they produced in their latest study. But to their surprise, adding only one more borrowed gene from the naturally blue butterfly pea plant (Clitoria ternatea) was enough.

Anthocyanins can turn petals red, violet or blue, depending on the pigments structure. Noda and his colleagues found that genes from the Canterbury bells and butterfly pea altered the molecular structure of the anthocyanin in the chrysanthemum. When the modified pigments interacted with compounds called flavone glucosides, the resulting chrysanthemum flowers were blue. The team tested the wavelengths given off by their blossoms in several ways to ensure that the flowers were truly blue.

The quest for blue blooms wouldn't only be applicable to the commercial flower market. Studying how these pigments work could also lead to the sustainable manufacture of artificial pigments, says Silvia Vignolini, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who has studied the molecular structure of the intensely blue marble berry.

Regardless, producing truly blue flowers is a great achievement and demonstrates that the underlying chemistry required to achieve 'blue' is complex and remains to be fully understood, says Albert.

Read the rest here:

'True blue' chrysanthemum flowers produced with genetic ... - Nature - Nature.com

Illustration by Luisa Rivere/Yale E360

The worldwide effort to return islands to their original wildlife, by eradicating rats, pigs, and other invasive species, has been one of the great environmental success stories of our time.Rewilding has succeeded on hundreds of islands, with beleaguered species surging back from imminent extinction, and dwindling bird colonies suddenly blossoming across old nesting grounds.

But these restoration campaigns are often massively expensive and emotionally fraught, with conservationists fearful of accidentally poisoning native wildlife, and animal rights activists having at times fiercely opposed the whole idea. So what if it were possible to rid islands of invasive species without killing a single animal? And at a fraction of the cost of current methods?

Thats the tantalising but also worrisome promise of synthetic biology, aBrave New Worldsort of technology that applies engineering principles to species and to biological systems. Its genetic engineering, but made easier and more precise by the new gene editing technology called CRISPR, which ecologists could use to splice in a DNA sequence designed to handicap an invasive species, or to help a native species adapt to a changing climate. Gene drive, another new tool, could then spread an introduced trait through a population far more rapidly than conventional Mendelian genetics would predict.

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Synthetic biology, also called synbio, is already a multi-billion dollar market, for manufacturing processes in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, biofuels, and agriculture. But many conservationists consider the prospect of using synbio methods as a tool for protecting the natural world deeply alarming. Jane Goodall, David Suzuki, and others havesigned a letterwarning that use of gene drives gives technicians the ability to intervene in evolution, to engineer the fate of an entire species, to dramatically modify ecosystems, and to unleash large-scale environmental changes, in ways never thought possible before.The signers of the letter argue that such a powerful and potentially dangerous technology should not be promoted as a conservation tool.

Environmentalists and synthetic biology engineers need to overcome what now amounts to mutual ignorance, a conservationist says.

On the other hand, a team of conservationbiologists writing early this yearin the journalTrends in Ecology and Evolutionran off a list of promising applications for synbio in the natural world, in addition to island rewilding:

Transplanting genes for resistance to white nose syndrome into bats, and for chytrid fungus into frogs and other amphibians.

Giving corals that are vulnerable to bleaching carefully selected genes from nearby corals that are more tolerant of heat and acidity.

Using artificial microbiomes to restore soils damaged by mining or pollution.

Eliminating populations of feral cats and dogs without euthanasia or surgical neutering, by producing generations that are genetically programmed to be sterile, or skewed to be overwhelmingly male.

And eradicating mosquitoes without pesticides, particularly in Hawaii, where they are highly destructive newcomers.

Kent Redford, a conservation consultant and co-author of that article, argues that conservationists and synbio engineers alike need to overcome what now amounts to mutual ignorance. Conservationists tend to have limited and often outdated knowledge of genetics and molecular biology, he says.Ina 2014 articleinOryx, he quoted one conservationist flatly declaring, Those were the courses we flunked. Stanford Universitys Drew Endy, one of the founders of synbio, volunteers in turn that 18 months ago he had never heard of the IUCN the International Union for Conservation of Nature or its Red List of endangered species.In engineering school, the ignorance gap is terrific, he adds.But its symmetric ignorance.

At a major synbio conference he organised last month in Singapore, Endy invited Redford and eight other conservationists to lead a session on biodiversity, with the aim, he says, of getting engineers building the bioeconomy to think about the natural world ahead of time My hope is that people are no longer merely nave in terms of their industrial disposition.

Likewise, Redford and the co-authors of the article inTrends in Ecology and Evolution, assert that it would be a disservice to the goal of protecting biodiversity if conservationists do not participate in applying the best science and thinkers to these issues. They argue that it is necessary to adapt the culture of conservation biologists to a rapidly-changing reality including the effects of climate change and emerging diseases.Twenty-first century conservation philosophy, the co-authors conclude, should embrace concepts of synthetic biology, and both seek and guide appropriate synthetic solutions to aid biodiversity.

Through gene drive technology, mice, rats or other invasive species can theoretically be eliminated from an island without killing anything.

The debate over synthetic biodiversity conservation, as theTrends in Ecology and Evolutionauthors term it, had its origins in a2003 paperby Austin Burt, an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London.He proposed a dramatically new tool for genetic engineering, based on certain naturally occurring selfish genetic elements, which manage to propagate themselves in as much as 99 percent of the next generation, rather than the usual 50 percent. Burt thought that it might be possible to use these super-Mendelian genes as a Trojan horse, to rapidly distribute altered DNA, and thus to genetically engineer natural populations. It was impractical at the time.Butdevelopmentof CRISPR technology soon brought the idea close to reality, and researchers have since demonstrated the effectiveness of gene drive, as the technique became known, in laboratory experiments on malaria mosquitoes, fruit flies, yeast, and human embryos.

Burt proposed one particularly ominous-sounding application for this new technology: It might be possible under certain conditions, he thought, that a genetic load sufficient to eradicate a population can be imposed in fewer than 20 generations. And this is, in fact, likely to be the first practical application of synthetic biodiversity conservation in the field. Eradicating invasive populationsis of coursethe inevitable first step in island rewilding projects.

The proposed eradication technique is to use the gene drive to deliver DNA that determines the gender of offspring.Because the gene drive propagates itself so thoroughly through subsequent generations, it can quickly cause a population to become almost all male and soon collapse.The result, at least in theory, is the elimination of mice, rats, or other invasive species from an island without anyone having killed anything.

Research to test the practicality of the method including moral, ethical, and legal considerations is already under way through a research consortium ofnonprofitgroups, universities, and government agencies in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.At North Carolina State University, for instance, researchers have begun working with a laboratory population of invasive mice taken from a coastal island.They need to determine how well a wild population will accept mice that have been altered in the laboratory.

The success of this idea depends heavily,according togene drive researcher Megan Serr, on the genetically modified male mice being studs with the island lady mice Will she want a hybrid male that is part wild, part lab? Beyond that, the research programme needs to figure out how many modified mice to introduce to eradicate an invasive population in a habitat of a particular size. Other significant practical challenges will also undoubtedly arise.For instance,a study early this yearin the journalGeneticsconcluded that resistance to CRISPR-modified gene drives should evolve almost inevitably in most natural populations.

Political and environmental resistance is also likely to develop.In an email, MIT evolutionary biologist Kevin Esvelt asserted that CRISPR-based gene drives are not suited for conservation due to the very high risk of spreading beyond the target species orenvironment. Even a gene drive systemintroduced toquickly eradicate an introduced population from an island, he added, still is likely to have over a year to escape or be deliberately transported off-island. If it is capable of spreading elsewhere, that is a major problem.

Even a highly contained field trial on a remote island is probably a decade or so away, said Heath Packard, of Island Conservation, a nonprofit that has been involved in numerous island rewilding projects and is now part of the research consortium.We are committed to a precautionary step-wise approach, with plenty of off-ramps, if it turns out to be too risky or not ethical.But his group notes that 80% of known extinctions over the past 500 or so years have occurred on islands, whicharealso home to 40% of species now considered at risk of extinction. That makes it important at least to begin to study the potential of synthetic biodiversity conservation.

Even if conservationists ultimately balk at these new technologies, business interests are already bringing synbio into the field for commercial purposes.For instance, a Pennsylvania State University researcher recently figured out how to use CRISPR gene editing to turn off genes that cause supermarket mushrooms to turn brown.The USDepartment of Agriculturelast year ruledthat these mushrooms would not be subject to regulation as a genetically modified organism because they contain no genes introduced from other species.

With those kinds of changes taking place all around them, conservationists absolutely must engage with the synthetic biology community, says Redford, and if we dont do so it will be at our peril. Synbio, he says, presents conservationists with a huge range of questions that no one is paying attention to yet.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is republished here with permission.

Read the original post:

Should genetic engineering be used as a tool for conservation? - chinadialogue

Plant species blooming blue flowers are relatively rare, Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Japan who led the research, noted in an email.

It took Dr. Noda and his colleagues years to create their blue chrysanthemum. They got close in 2013, engineering a bluer-colored one by splicing in a gene from Canterbury bells, which naturally make blue flowers. The resulting blooms were violet. This time, they added a gene from another naturally blue flower called the butterfly pea.

Both of these plants produce pigments for orange, red and purple called delphinidin-based anthocyanins. (Theyre present in cranberries, grapes and pomegranates, too.) Under a few different conditions, these pigments, which are sensitive to changes in pH, can start a chemical transformation within a flower, rendering it blue.

The additional gene did the trick. It added a sugar molecule to the pigment, shifting the plants pH and altering the chrysanthemums color. The researchers confirmed the color as blue by testing its wavelengths in the lab.

What they did was already being done in nature: No blue flowers actually have blue pigment. Neither do blue eyes or blue birds. They all get help from a few clever design hacks.

Blue flowers tend to result from the modification of red pigments shifting their acidity levels, switching up their molecules and ions, or mixing them with other molecules and ions.

Some petunias, for example, have a genetic mutation that breaks pumps inside their cells, altering their pH and turning them blue. Some morning glories shift from blue upon opening to pink upon closing, as acidity levels in the plant fluctuate. Many hydrangeas turn blue if the soil is acidified, as many gardeners know.

In vertebrates, blue coloring often is more about structure. Blue eyes exist because, lacking pigments to absorb color, they reflect blue light. Blue feathers, like those of the kingfisher, would be brown or gray without a special structural coating that reflects blue.

Reflection is also the reason for the most intense color in the world, the shiny blue of the marble-esque Pollia fruit in Africa.

Despite widespread blue-philia, the new chrysanthemums may meet a cool reception. A permit is required to sell genetically modified organisms in the United States, and there isnt one for these transgenic flowers.

Officials are wary of transgenic plants that might take root in the environment, because of their possible impacts on other plants and insects. Dr. Noda and his colleagues are working on blue chrysanthemums that cant reproduce, but its unlikely youll see them in the flower shop anytime soon.

Continued here:

Scientists Give a Chrysanthemum the Blues - New York Times

Some of the most powerful technologies ever invented whichcan literally change human life at the DNAlevel aremoving forward with very little societal discussion or sufficient regulatory oversight. Technology Review is now reporting an attempt in the US to use CRISPR to genetically modify a human embryo. From the story:

The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon,Technology Reviewhas learned.

The effort, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University, involved changing the DNA of a large number of one-cell embryos with the gene-editing technique CRISPR, according to people familiar with the scientific results

Now Mitalipov is believed to have broken new ground both in the number of embryos experimented upon and by demonstrating that it is possible to safely and efficiently correct defective genes that cause inherited diseases.

Although none of the embryos were allowed to develop for more than a few daysand there was never any intention of implanting them into a wombthe experiments are a milestone on what may prove to be an inevitable journey toward the birth of the first genetically modified humans.

It may begin with curing disease. But it wont stay there. Many are drooling to engage in eugenic genetic enhancements.

So, are we going to just watch, slack-jawed, the double-time marchto Brave New World unfoldbefore our eyes?

Or are we going to engage democratic deliberation to determine if this should be done, and if so, what the parameters are?

Considering recent history, I fear I know the answer.

And NO: I dont trust the scientists to regulate themselves.

Mr. President: We need a presidential bioethics/biotechnology commission now!

Originally posted here:

Human Genetic Engineering Begins! | National Review - National Review

Roses are red, but science could someday turn them blue. Thats one of the possible future applications of a technique researchers have used to genetically engineer blue chrysanthemums for the first time.

Chyrsanthemums come in an array of colours, including pink, yellow and red. But all it took to engineer the truly blue hueand not a violet or bluish colourwas tinkering with two genes, scientists report in a study published on July 26 inScience Advances. The team says that the approach could be applied to other commercially important flowers, including carnations and lilies.

Consumers love novelty, says Nick Albert, a plant biologist at the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand. And people actively seek out plants with blue flowers to fill their gardens.

Plenty of flowers are bluish, but its rare to find true blue in nature, says Naonobu Noda, a plant researcher at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization near Tsukuba, Japan, and lead study author. Scientists, including Noda, have tried to artificially produce blue blooms for years:efforts that have often produced violet or bluish huesin flowers such as roses and carnations. Part of the problem is that naturally blue blossoming plants arent closely related enough to commercially important flowers for traditional methodsincluding selective breedingto work.

Most truly blue blossoms overexpress genes that trigger the production of pigments called delphinidin-based anthocyanins. The trick to getting blue flowers in species that arent naturally that colour is inserting the right combination of genes into their genomes. Noda came close in a 2013 studywhen he and his colleagues found that adding a gene from a naturally blue Canterbury bells flower (Campanula medium) into the DNA of chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium) produced a violet-hued bloom.

Noda says he and his team expected that they would need to manipulate many more genes to get the blue chrysanthemum they produced in their latest study. But to their surprise, adding only one more borrowed gene from the naturally blue butterfly pea plant (Clitoria ternatea) was enough.

Anthocyanins can turn petals red, violet or blue, depending on the pigments structure. Noda and his colleagues found that genes from the Canterbury bells and butterfly pea altered the molecular structure of the anthocyanin in the chrysanthemum. When the modified pigments interacted with compounds called flavone glucosides, the resulting chrysanthemum flowers were blue. The team tested the wavelengths given off by their blossoms in several ways to ensure that the flowers were truly blue.

The quest for blue blooms wouldn't only be applicable to the commercial flower market. Studying how these pigments work could also lead to the sustainable manufacture of artificial pigments, says Silvia Vignolini, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who has studied themolecular structure of the intensely blue marble berry.

Regardless, producing truly blue flowers is a great achievement and demonstrates that the underlying chemistry required to achieve 'blue' is complex and remains to be fully understood, says Albert.

This article is reproduced with permission and wasfirst publishedon July 26, 2017.

Read more from the original source:

True Blue Chrysanthemum Flowers Produced with Genetic Engineering - Scientific American

Pancreatic cancer is a killer; 85% of patients die within nine months of diagnosis. A new study sheds light on how the cancer spreads throughout the body.

The study, published in the journal Cell by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, reports that the cancers spread is controlled by epigeneticschanges that arent hardwired into DNA, but affect how genes are expressed. To make this discovery, scientists grew and tested balls of cells that mimic the shape and behavior of the pancreas, known as pancreatic organoids. These organoids may one day lead to personalized cancer treatments.

In a few years, pancreatic cancer will become the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United Stateseclipsing colon and breast canceraccording to Howard Crawford, director of the pancreas research program at University of Michigan. But pancreatic cancer garners far less public attention than other malignancies.

Thats because we dont have any survivors, Crawford tells GEN. We dont have people that can bring a lot of press. We all have to rely on the patients families and loved ones to raise awareness. And thats a challenge.

The cancer is so deadly because pancreatic tumors regularly break off and spread to far-flung regions of the bodya process known as metastasis. Scientists have tried to identify genes that control the cancer, but genetics dont tell the whole story.

We have a pretty good understanding of how pancreatic cells become pancreatic tumor cells, said Chang-Il Hwang, postdocoral fellow and co-first author of the study. We dont know how they metastasize to distant organs.

To understand the cancers spread, Hwang and colleagues collected pancreatic tumors and their metastases from mice and grew the cells in a dish. The cells formed tiny 3D structures known as organoids, which looked and acted like pancreatic cells.

When the researchers compared organoids from the initial tumor to organoids from the metastases, they didnt find major genetic differences. But they did see that metastatic organoids had more active enhancersshort regions of DNA that boost gene expression by binding to proteins.

The roughly 800 enhancers active in metastatic organoids were linked to embryonic pancreas formation. In effect, metastatic cells were turning back the clock and reverting to an earlier state in order to leave the pancreas.

The researchers analyzed the DNA sequences of the enhancers to find the protein that binds to them, and found FOXA1. When they expressed high levels of FOXA1 in organoids and injected them into the tails of mice, the organoids spread to the lunga sign of metastasis. But when the researchers injected mice with organoids lacking FOXA1, they didnt metastasize.

The scientists also checked human pancreatic tissue samples and found that FOXA1 increased with disease severityconsistent with its role in metastasis. Hwang is now working to better understand how FOXA1 works in order to develop future therapies.

The future goal will be to try to utilize this information to benefit metastatic pancreatic cancer patients, said Hwang.

Because organoids are grown from a patients cells, Hwang and others may be able to use them to personalize cancer treatments. A researcher could grow organoids from a tumor, treat those organoids with a variety of drugs, and see which drugs work best before administering the drug to a patient. But this takes timesomething that pancreatic cancer patients have in short supply.

It takes almost a month or more to establish a good organoid culture from a pancreatic patient, said Crawford. If a patient has six to nine months to live, thats not a lot of time.

Crawford believes the key is earlier diagnosis. Ten percent of patients have a family history of the disease and genetic markers that put them at risk. He thinks these people should be screened early and often. But screening the rest of the population will be a challenge.

We have to have a fairly perfect way to screen [the] population, he said. Even with a 98% or 99% success rate theres a large number of people there that would falsely be diagnosed and a few that would be missed.

Here is the original post:

Pancreas in a Dish Tells Story of How Metastatic Cells Turn Back Time - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (press release)

Naonobu Noda/NARO

Giving chrysanthemums the blues was easier than researchers thought it would be.

Roses are red, but science could someday turn them blue. Thats one of the possible future applications of a technique researchers have used to genetically engineer blue chrysanthemums for the first time.

Chyrsanthemums come in an array of colours, including pink, yellow and red. But all it took to engineer the truly blue hue and not a violet or bluish colour was tinkering with two genes, scientists report in a study published on 26 July in Science Advances1. The team says that the approach could be applied to other commercially important flowers, including carnations and lilies.

Consumers love novelty, says Nick Albert, a plant biologist at the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand. And people actively seek out plants with blue flowers to fill their gardens.

Plenty of flowers are bluish, but its rare to find true blue in nature, says Naonobu Noda, a plant researcher at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization near Tsukuba, Japan, and lead study author. Scientists, including Noda, have tried to artificially produce blue blooms for years: efforts that have often produced violet or bluish hues in flowers such as roses and carnations. Part of the problem is that naturally blue blossoming plants arent closely related enough to commercially important flowers for traditional methods including selective breeding to work.

Most truly blue blossoms overexpress genes that trigger the production of pigments called delphinidin-based anthocyanins. The trick to getting blue flowers in species that arent naturally that colour is inserting the right combination of genes into their genomes. Noda came close in a 2013 study2 when he and his colleagues found that adding a gene from a naturally blue Canterbury bells flower (Campanula medium) into the DNA of chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium) produced a violet-hued bloom.

Noda says he and his team expected that they would need to manipulate many more genes to get the blue chrysanthemum they produced in their latest study. But to their surprise, adding only one more borrowed gene from the naturally blue butterfly pea plant (Clitoria ternatea) was enough.

Anthocyanins can turn petals red, violet or blue, depending on the pigments structure. Noda and his colleagues found that genes from the Canterbury bells and butterfly pea altered the molecular structure of the anthocyanin in the chrysanthemum. When the modified pigments interacted with compounds called flavone glucosides, the resulting chrysanthemum flowers were blue. The team tested the wavelengths given off by their blossoms in several ways to ensure that the flowers were truly blue.

The quest for blue blooms wouldn't only be applicable to the commercial flower market. Studying how these pigments work could also lead to the sustainable manufacture of artificial pigments, says Silvia Vignolini, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who has studied the molecular structure of the intensely blue marble berry.

Regardless, producing truly blue flowers is a great achievement and demonstrates that the underlying chemistry required to achieve 'blue' is complex and remains to be fully understood, says Albert.

See the article here:

'True blue' chrysanthemum flowers produced with genetic engineering - Nature.com

[Ghanas] Ministry of Environment, Science, Innovation and Technology has encouraged local scientists to intensify research into ways to fight the fall army worm.

[At the] Council for Scientific and Industrial Researchs (CSIR) Open Day in Kumasi [capital city of Ghanas Ashanti region], Sector Minister, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, said the Crop Research Institute (CRI) has medium and long term plans using science and genetic engineering to produce something that could fight the fall armyworm in the years to come.

He added that it will help solve the threat of the deadly pest, which has destroyed swathes of farm fields across the country, and also a threat to governments Planting for food and Jobs program.

Professor Frimpong Boateng stated that he is elated that the Minister of Agriculture has affirmed his support to the research.

He also added that the research will include seed development so that by four years time the country will be able to produce more seeds and import less.

To the research community, the president has promised to devote 1% of the GDP towards research and development for all of us, if the right structures are put in place, he said.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Environment Ministry to intensify research on how to deal with fall armyworm infestation

Read the original here:

Ghana mulling genetic engineering to combat armyworm crop damage - Genetic Literacy Project

For more than half a century, scientists have dreamed of harnessing an odd quirk of nature selfish genes, which bypass the normal 50/50 laws of inheritance and force their way into offspringto engineer entire species. A few years ago, the advent of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology turned this science fictional concept into a dazzling potential reality, called a gene drive. But after all the hype, and fear of the technologys misuse, scientists are now questioning whether gene drives will work at all.

Gene drive is a molecular technology that forces an edited gene to be passed along into all of an organisms offspring, overriding natures 50/50 inheritance mix. The first human-engineered gene drive was only demonstrated in fruit flies in 2015, but scientists were soon talking about using gene drives to exterminate invasive pests or kill off throngs of malarial mosquitoes.

But soon after,other researchers demonstrated that as an infertility mutation in female mosquitoes was successfully passed on to offspring over many generations, resistance emerged, allowing some mosquitoes to avoid inheriting the mutation. Just as bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics, wild populations can develop resistance to modifications aimed at destroying them. Gene drive, dead.

Now, in a new paper out Thursday in PLOS Genetics, scientists at Cornell show that, at least in fruit flies, many more flies than expected seemed to possess a natural genetic resistance to gene drive. The paper offers even stronger evidence that engineering large populations of wild species isnt as simple as splicing open a genome and inserting some gene drive DNA.

In New Zealand, the government is mulling using gene drives to wipe out invasive pests. On Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard, one scientist wants to use it to eradicate Lyme disease. In Guam, they want to control tree snakes. But not so fast, scientists are saying.

These resistance rates were so high that a gene drive would not spread in a population, Phillip Messer, a co-author on the study, told Gizmodo. Our take home is that resistance is clearly a bigger problem than we had initially thought. This technology could still work, but its not as simple as the first papers suggested.

The Cornell paper appeared alongside an opinion piece with a headline that suggested a provocative notion: Until now, the conversation about gene drives has existed in a reality-free bubble.

This resistance outcome would easily thwart virtually any intended application of a gene drive, and it poses a serious challenge to the many hoped-for applications of this technology, its authors wrote.

Resistance isnt the only hurdle to putting gene drives to practical use. For one, so far, synthetic gene drives have only been demonstrated to work in insects and yeast. Safety is a big concern. And based on the outcry such science has already seen from environmental groups, its safe to say there will be a fair number of regulatory and political obstacles, too.

But resistance may very well be the biggest problem, and its a problem that has been downplayed until recently.

People are starting to dig more into the nuances of this stuff and were getting into the nitty gritty of what needs to be addressed, Gabriel Zenter, an Indiana University biologist, told Gizmodo.

In the new research, scientists for the first time gave some hint of the mechanisms that may be responsible for resistance. Certain flies, even though they were all members of the same species, just seemed to be better equipped genetically to fight back against a drive. They also found that resistance developed both before fertilization in the germline, and within an embryo. And resistance could crop up within a single generation. This means that were a gene drive deployed in the wild, it is hard to say how effective it would really be.

You dont know whats lurking around in the genome that could influence a gene drive positively or negatively, said Zenter, who was not associated with the study. People didnt anticipate things like the genetic background issue. I think were kind of coming towards a more mature understanding of the hurdles that will need surmounted.

At least a few research groups already are working on a way around those hurdles. In another paper out this year, researchers proposed a way to redesign gene drives in order to work around potential immunity, hypothesizing that a more complex architecture would make it difficult for a mutation to occur in a short period of time. Instead of just including instructions for a gene drive to cut a piece of DNA in one place, their architecture it cuts in multiple places, meaning it would require multiple mutations to overwrite the drive. They also suggested a second method that harnesses a species survival programing, targeting areas of the genome that are essential to a species fitness, and which are less likely to mutate in the first place.

In a pre-print paper, Messers lab has already experimented with the first scenario. It works, but not as well as we had hoped, he said.

In the end, he said, a working gene drive will probably be much more complex than anyone imagines, incorporating several different strategies into the architecture to override resistance.

Charleston Noble, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate studying gene drives, is more optimistic. After all, he points out, mosquito species have shown to be naturally less likely to develop resistance than fruit flies. Not every species might be so tricky to manipulate, and in some cases you may not need to alter an entire population to bring about the desired change.

And Kevin Esvelt, a synthetic biologist at MIT, said the experiments only confirmed what scientists have long known.

These elegant experiments conclusively show that there is no reason to build a gene drive system that only cleaves a single site, he told Gizmodo. Im not so sure it amounts to popping a bubble in the field, or that this is any kind of new reality.

In the realm of synthetic biology, it has become a well-worn cliche that life finds a way. In the end, though, there is something to it. Engineering nature will require more than the flip of a simple genetic switch.

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Genetically Engineering Nature Will Be Way More Complicated Than We Thought - Gizmodo

Researchers are considering ways to use synthetic biology for such conservation goals as eradicating invasive species or strengthening endangered coral. But environmentalists are worried about the ethical questions and unwanted consequences of this new gene-altering technology.

By RichardConniff July20,2017

The worldwide effort to return islands to their original wildlife, by eradicating rats, pigs, and other invasive species, has been one of the great environmental success stories of our time. Rewilding has succeeded on hundreds of islands, with beleaguered species surging back from imminent extinction, and dwindling bird colonies suddenly blossoming across old nesting grounds.

But these restoration campaigns are often massively expensive and emotionally fraught, with conservationists fearful of accidentally poisoning native wildlife, and animal rights activists having at times fiercely opposed the whole idea. So what if it were possible to rid islands of invasive species without killing a single animal? And at a fraction of the cost of current methods?

Thats the tantalizing but also worrisome promise of synthetic biology, aBrave New Worldsort of technology that applies engineering principles to species and to biological systems. Its genetic engineering, but made easier and more precise by the new gene editing technology called CRISPR, which ecologists could use to splice in a DNA sequence designed to handicap an invasive species, or to help a native species adapt to a changing climate. Gene drive, another new tool, could then spread an introduced trait through a population far more rapidly than conventional Mendelian genetics would predict.

Synthetic biology, also called synbio, is already a multi-billion dollar market, for manufacturing processes in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, biofuels, and agriculture. But many conservationists consider the prospect of using synbio methods as a tool for protecting the natural world deeply alarming. Jane Goodall, David Suzuki, and others havesigned a letterwarning that use of gene drives gives technicians the ability to intervene in evolution, to engineer the fate of an entire species, to dramatically modify ecosystems, and to unleash large-scale environmental changes, in ways never thought possible before. The signers of the letter argue that such a powerful and potentially dangerous technology should not be promoted as a conservation tool.

On the other hand, a team of conservation biologists writing early this year in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution ran off a list of promising applications for synbio in the natural world, in addition to island rewilding:

Kent Redford, a conservation consultant and co-author of that article, argues that conservationists and synbio engineers alike need to overcome what now amounts to mutual ignorance. Conservationists tend to have limited and often outdated knowledge of genetics and molecular biology, he says. In a 2014 article in Oryx, he quoted one conservationist flatly declaring, Those were the courses we flunked. Stanford Universitys Drew Endy, one of the founders of synbio, volunteers in turn that 18 months ago he had never heard of the IUCNthe International Union for Conservation of Natureor its Red List of endangered species. In engineering school, the ignorance gap is terrific, he adds. But its symmetric ignorance.

At a major synbio conference he organized last month in Singapore, Endy invited Redford and eight other conservationists to lead a session on biodiversity, with the aim, he says, of getting engineers building the bioeconomy to think about the natural world ahead of time My hope is that people are no longer merely nave in terms of their industrial disposition.

Likewise, Redford and the co-authors of the article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, assert that it would be a disservice to the goal of protecting biodiversity if conservationists do not participate in applying the best science and thinkers to these issues. They argue that it is necessary to adapt the culture of conservation biologists to a rapidly-changing realityincluding the effects of climate change and emerging diseases. Twenty-first century conservation philosophy, the co-authors conclude, should embrace concepts of synthetic biology, and both seek and guide appropriate synthetic solutions to aid biodiversity.

The debate over synthetic biodiversity conservation, as theTrends in Ecology and Evolutionauthors term it, had its origins in a2003 paperby Austin Burt, an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London. He proposed a dramatically new tool for genetic engineering, based on certain naturally occurring selfish genetic elements, which manage to propagate themselves in as much as 99 percent of the next generation, rather than the usual 50 percent. Burt thought that it might be possible to use these super-Mendelian genes as a Trojan horse, to rapidly distribute altered DNA, and thus to genetically engineer natural populations. It was impractical at the time. Butdevelopmentof CRISPR technology soon brought the idea close to reality, and researchers have since demonstrated the effectiveness of gene drive, as the technique became known, in laboratory experiments on malaria mosquitoes, fruit flies, yeast, and human embryos.

Burt proposed one particularly ominous-sounding application for this new technology: It might be possible under certain conditions, he thought, that a genetic load sufficient to eradicate a population can be imposed in fewer than 20 generations. And this is, in fact, likely to be the first practical application of synthetic biodiversity conservation in the field. Eradicating invasive populationsis of coursethe inevitable first step in island rewilding projects.

The proposed eradication technique is to use the gene drive to deliver DNA that determines the gender of offspring. Because the gene drive propagates itself so thoroughly through subsequent generations, it can quickly cause a population to become almost all male and soon collapse. The result, at least in theory, is the elimination of mice, rats, or other invasive species from an island without anyone having killed anything.

Research to test the practicality of the methodincluding moral, ethical, and legal considerationsis already under way through a research consortium ofnonprofitgroups, universities, and government agencies in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. At North Carolina State University, for instance, researchers have begun working with a laboratory population of invasive mice taken from a coastal island. They need to determine how well a wild population will accept mice that have been altered in the laboratory.

The success of this idea depends heavily,according togene drive researcher Megan Serr, on the genetically modified male mice being studs with the island lady mice Will she want a hybrid male that is part wild, part lab? Beyond that, the research program needs to figure out how many modified mice to introduce to eradicate an invasive population in a habitat of a particular size. Other significant practical challenges will also undoubtedly arise. For instance,a study early this yearin the journalGeneticsconcluded that resistance to CRISPR-modified gene drives should evolve almost inevitably in most natural populations.

Political and environmental resistance is also likely to develop. In an email, MIT evolutionary biologist Kevin Esvelt asserted that CRISPR-based gene drives are not suited for conservation due to the very high risk of spreading beyond the target species orenvironment. Even a gene drive systemintroduced toquickly eradicate an introduced population from an island, he added, still is likely to have over a year to escape or be deliberately transported off-island. If it is capable of spreading elsewhere, that is a major problem.

Even a highly contained field trial on a remote island is probably a decade or so away, said Heath Packard, of Island Conservation, a nonprofit that has been involved in numerous island rewilding projects and is now part of the research consortium. We are committed to a precautionary step-wise approach, with plenty of off-ramps, if it turns out to be too risky or not ethical. But his group notes that 80 percent of known extinctions over the past 500 or so years have occurred on islands, whicharealso home to 40 percent of species now considered at risk of extinction. That makes it important at least to begin to study the potential of synthetic biodiversity conservation.

Even if conservationists ultimately balk at these new technologies, business interests are already bringing synbio into the field for commercial purposes. For instance, a Pennsylvania State University researcher recently figured out how to use CRISPR gene editing to turn off genes that cause supermarket mushrooms to turn brown. The U.S. Department of Agriculturelast year ruledthat these mushrooms would not be subject to regulation as a genetically modified organism because they contain no genes introduced from other species.

With those kinds of changes taking place all around them, conservationists absolutely must engage with the synthetic biology community, says Redford, and if we dont do so it will be at our peril. Synbio, he says, presents conservationists with a huge range of questions that no one is paying attention to yet.

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. His latest book is House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth. He is a frequent contributor to Yale Environment 360. More about Richard Conniff

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Should Genetic Engineering Be Used as a Tool for Conservation? - Yale Environment 360

DARPA created the Safe Genes program to gain a fundamental understanding of how gene editing technologies function; devise means to safely,A responsibly, and predictably harness them for beneficial ends; and address potential health and security concerns related to their accidental or intentional misuse. DARPA announced awards to seven teams that will pursue that mission, led by: The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Riverside. DARPA plans to invest $65 million in Safe Genes over the next four years as these teams work to collect empirical data and develop a suite of versatile tools that can be applied independently or in combination to support bio-innovation and combat bio-threats.

UC Berkeleys Jennifer Doudna, who co-invented CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, will investigate whether these gene editing tools might someday be capable of disabling bioterrorism threats, such as novel infectious agents or weapons employing CRISPR itself.

Scientists have also uncovered numerous variants of the Cas9 protein that have potential use in research or medical therapy, plus proteins called anti-CRISPRs that throw a wrench into the Cas machinery and stop gene editing. The UC Berkeley-led collaboration will explore the potential of all of these.

Our focus is not only to make new Cas proteins that are more accurate, but also ones that dont necessarily cut the genome, said Kyle Watters, a postdoctoral researcher in Doudnas lab who is overseeing some of the work. These engineered Cas proteins might instead prevent certain genes from being expressed, for example, so that even though they change fundamental processes in your body, they are not ultimately changing the blueprint of your DNA.

This could involve targeting messenger RNA, the working copy of the gene used to build proteins, or recruiting enzymes to modify the epigenome chemical signals like methyl groups that signal the cell whether to transcribe genes or leave them alone.

The researchers hope to generate new and better tools from these specialized Cas enzymes, develop anti-CRISPR proteins as a kill switch to halt gene editing a sort of fail-safe mechanism and explore new ways of delivering fully functional CRISPR-Cas complexes into live cells.

Gene editing technologies have captured increasing attention from healthcare professionals, policymakers, and community leaders in recent years for their potential to selectively disable cancerous cells in the body, control populations of disease-spreading mosquitos, and defend native flora and fauna against invasive species, among other uses. The potential national security applications and implications of these technologies are equally profound, including protection of troops against infectious disease, mitigation of threats posed by irresponsible or nefarious use of biological technologies, and enhanced development of new resources derived from synthetic biology, such as novel chemicals, materials, and coatings with useful, unique properties.

Achieving such ambitious goals, however, will require more complete knowledge about how gene editors, and derivative technologies including gene drives, function at various physical and temporal scales under different environmental conditions, across multiple generations of an organism. In parallel, demonstrating the ability to precisely control gene edits, turning them on and off under certain conditions or even reversing their effects entirely, will be paramount to translation of these tools to practical applications. By establishing empirical foundations and removing lingering unknowns through laboratory-based demonstrations, the Safe Genes teams will work to substantially minimize the risks inherent in such powerful tools.

The field of gene editing has been advancing at an astounding pace, opening the door to previously impossible genetic solutions but without much emphasis on how to mitigate potential downsides, said Renee Wegrzyn, the Safe Genes program manager. DARPA launched Safe Genes to begin to refine those capabilities by emphasizing safety first for the full range of potential applications, enabling responsible science to proceed by providing tools to prevent and mitigate misuse.

Each of the seven teams will pursue one or more of three technical objectives: develop genetic constructsbiomolecular instructionsthat provide spatial, temporal, and reversible control of genome editors in living systems; devise new drug-based countermeasures that provide prophylactic and treatment options to limit genome editing in organisms and protect genome integrity in populations of organisms; and create a capability to eliminate unwanted engineered genes from systems and restore them to genetic baseline states. Safe Genes research will not involve any releases of organisms into the environment; however, the researchperformed in contained facilitiescould inform potential future applications, including safe, predictable, and reversible gene drives.

During the course of the program, teams will engage with potential stakeholders, including government regulators, to increase the value of the science and to shape experiments around their questions and concerns. Additionally, as an aid to policymakers, the teams will establish models for incorporating stakeholder engagement into future decisions on whether and how to apply such tools.

Part of our challenge and commitment under Safe Genes is to make sense of the ethical implications of gene editing technologies, understanding peoples concerns and directing our research to proactively address them so that stakeholders are equipped with data to inform future choices, Wegrzyn said. As with all powerful capabilities, society can and should weigh the risks and merits of responsibly using such tools. We believe that further research and development can inform that conversation by helping people to understand and shape what is possible, probable, and vulnerable with these technologies. Gene editing is truly a case where you cant easily draw a line between ethics and pure technology developmenttheyre inextricableand were hopeful that the model we establish with Safe Genes will guide future research efforts in this space.

The efforts funded under the Safe Genes program fall into two broad categories: gene drive and genetic remediation technologies, and in vivo therapeutic applications of gene editors in mammals.

* A team led by Dr. Amit Choudhary (Broad Institute/Brigham and Womens Hospital-Renal Division/Harvard Medical School) is developing means to switch on and off genome editing in bacteria, mammals, and insects, including control of gene drives in a mosquito vector for malaria, Anopheles stephensi. The team seeks to build a general platform for the rapid and cost-effective identification of chemicals that will block contemporary and next-generation genome editors. Such chemicals could propel the development of therapeutic applications of genome editors by limiting off-target effects or protect against future biological threats. The team will also construct synthetic genome editors for precision genome engineering. * A Harvard Medical School team led by Dr. George Church seeks to develop systems to safeguard genomes by detecting, preventing, and ultimately reversing mutations that may arise from exposure to radiation. This work will involve creation of novel computational and molecular tools to enable the development of precise editors that can distinguish between highly similar genetic sequences. The team also plans to screen the effectiveness of natural and synthetic drugs to inhibit gene editing activity. * A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) team led by Dr. Keith Joung aims to develop novel, highly sensitive methods to control and measure on-target genome editing activityand limit and measure off-target activityand apply these methods to regulate the activity of mosquito gene drive systems over multiple generations. State-of-the-art technologies for measuring on- and off-target activity require specialized expertise; the MGH team hopes to enable orders of magnitude higher sensitivity than what is available with existing methods and make this process routine and scalable. The team will also develop novel strategies to achieve control over genome editors, including drug-regulated versions of these molecules. The team will take advantage of contained facilities that simulate natural environments to study how drive systems perform in mosquitos under conditions approximating the real world. * A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team led by Dr. Kevin Esvelt has been selected to pursue modular daisy drive platforms with the potential to safely, efficiently, and reversibly edit local sub-populations of organisms within a geographic region of interest. Daisy drive systems are self-exhausting because they sequentially lose genetic elements until the drive system stops spreading. In one proposed variant, natural selection is anticipated to favor the edited or original version depending on which is in the majority, keeping genetic alterations confined to a specified region and potentially allowing targeted populations of organisms to be restored to wild-type genetics. MIT plans to conduct the majority of its work in nematodes, a simple type of worm that reproduces rapidly, enabling high-throughput testing of different drive configurations and predictive models over multiple generations. The team then aims to adapt this system in the laboratory for up to three key mosquito species relevant to human and animal health, gradually improving performance in mosquitos through an iterative cycle of model, test, and refine. * A North Carolina State University (NCSU) team led by Dr. John Godwin aims to develop and test a mammalian gene drive system in rodents. The teams genetic technique targets population-specific genetic variants found only in particular invasive communities of animals. If successful, the work will expand the tools available to manage invasive species that threaten biodiversity and human food security, and that serve as potential reservoirs of infectious diseases affecting native animal and human populations. The team also plans to develop mathematical models of how drives would function in mice, and then perform testing in contained, simulated natural environments to gauge the robustness, spatial limitation, and reversibility of the drives. * A University of California, Berkeley team led by Dr. Jennifer Doudna will investigate the development of novel, safe gene editing tools for use as antiviral agents in animal models, targeting the Zika and Ebola viruses. The team will also aim to identify anti-CRISPR proteins capable of inhibiting unwanted genome-editing activity, while developing novel strategies for delivery of genome editors and inhibitors. * A University of California, Riverside team led by Dr. Omar Akbari seeks to develop robust and reversible gene drive systems for control of Aedes aegypti mosquito populations, to be tested in contained, simulated natural environments. Preliminary testing will be conducted in high-throughput, rapidly reproducing populations of yeast as a model system. As part of this effort, the team will establish new temporal and environmental, context-dependent molecular strategies programmed to limit gene editor activity, create multiple capabilities to eliminate unwanted gene drives from populations through passive or active reversal, and establish mathematical models to inform design of gene drive systems and establish criteria for remediation strategies. In support of these goals, the team will sample the diversity of wild populations of Ae. aegypti.

The teams intend to refine their research over the course of the program, building initial mathematical models of gene editing systems, testing them in insect and animal models to validate hypotheses, and feeding the results back into the simulations to tune parameters. Teams will also incorporate insights garnered from engagement with regulators and in some cases from local communities considering gene editing applications, and may run additional experiments to collect data that address concerns and could inform future regulatory reviews.

Given the potential of gene editing systems to broadly impact national security, health, and the environment, DARPA is committed to a high level of transparency and engagement in its Safe Genes research. The program will work with independent experts to help DARPA and the teams think through Legal, Ethical, Environmental, Dual-Use, and Responsible innovation (LEEDR) issues. In a separate but related effort, DARPA previously co-funded a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on gene drives to help initiate the development of a framework for considering the implications of advances in gene editing, and to make recommendations on a responsible way forward.

One aspect of Safe Genes that Im most proud of is that were involving potential stakeholders from the beginning, many of whom are already considering gene editing technologies as options for responding to different health and environmental challenges but who have questions about how solutions involving gene editors would actually work, said Wegrzyn. DARPA sees their involvement in the Safe Genes program as invaluable for developing a model in which consideration of societal impact isnt an afterthought, but instead a foundation on which science advances.

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DARPA funds $65 million for safer genetic engineering and technology to fight bioterrorism - Next Big Future

Coral reefs are our most diverse marine habitat. They provide more than $30 billion to the world economy every year and directly support over 500 million people. However, they are vulnerable with climate change impact models predicting that most of our coral reefs will be eradicated within this century if we do not act immediately to protect them.

Rachel Levin, from The University of New South Wales, Australia and her international team of researchers may have found a solution to reduce coral bleaching by genetically engineering the microalgae found in corals, enhancing their stress tolerance to ocean warming.

These microalgae are called Symbiodinium, a genus of primary producers found in coral that are essential for coral reef health and, thereby, critical to ocean productivity. Symbiodinium photosynthesize to produce molecules that feed the corals, which is necessary corals to grow and form coral reefs.

Coral bleaching is caused by changes in ocean temperatures which harm Symbiodinium, leading corals to lose their symbiotic Symbiodinium and therefore starve to death.

Different species of Symbiodinium have large genetic variation and diverse thermal tolerances which effect the bleaching tolerance of corals. In research published in Frontiers in Microbiology, the researchers use sequencing data from Symbiodinium to design genetic engineering strategies for enhancing stress tolerance of Symbiodinium, which may reduce coral bleaching due to rising ocean temperatures.

"Very little is known about Symbiodinium, thus very little information is available to improve coral reef conservation efforts. Symbiodinium is very biologically unusual, which has made it incompatible with well-established genetic engineering methods. We therefore aimed to overcome this roadblock by conducting novel genetic analyses of Symbiodinium to enable much needed research progress," explains Rachel Levin.

The researchers have now highlighted key Symbiodinium genes that could be targeted to prevent coral bleaching.

"Symbiodinium that have been genetically enhanced to maintain their symbiosis with corals under rising ocean temperatures has great potential to reduce coral bleaching globally" they suggest.

However, Levin does warn that this is no easy miracle cure.

"If lab experiments successfully show that genetically engineered Symbiodinium can prevent coral bleaching, these enhanced Symbiodinium would not be immediately released onto coral reefs. Extensive, rigorous studies evaluating any potentially negative impacts would be absolutely necessary before any field-based trials on this technology begin."

In order to progress, other researchers will need to contribute to this research to advance the information currently available.

"We have developed the first, tailored genetic engineering framework to be applied to Symbiodinium. Now this framework must be comprehensively tested and optimized. This is a tall order that will be greatly benefitted by collaborative efforts."

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A Super-algae to Save our Seas - Laboratory Equipment

Before Sam Sternberg was part of the scientific breakthrough of the century, he was one of the winners of Lancaster Countys science and engineering fair.

CRISPR can be explained as a find-and-replace tool, Sternberg said in a Common Hour talk at Frankin & Marshall College last year. It can find misspelled sequences of DNA that cause genetic mutations and replace them with the right sequences.

Sternberg did his doctoral research in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where Doudna made this important discovery. Since then, researchers have been fighting in court over the patent for genetic engineering with CRISPR.

After Sternberg finished his graduate work, he focused on co-writing the book about the CRISPRs discovery to bring the story to an audience beyond the science community.

Doudnas memoir is partly an attempt to sustain her voice in the debate over Crisprs practical and less-practical uses and partly an effort to secure her legacy, Bloomberg writes.

Some reviewers say they would have liked more discussion on the ethics of genetic engineering, especially on genes that are inheritable.

Doudna and Sternberg predict that within a generation there will be little left untouched by CRISPR, says a review from Science." As such, its impossible not to wonder if the motivation behind the book is to stake Doudnas claims on the technology or if, perhaps, it is meant to serve as a preemptive mea culpa for unleashing a technology that will irrevocably alter life on Earth.

There are many compelling reasons for why this is a worthy contribution for any booklist, but for Berkeley the justification is even richer. UC Berkeley has been ground zero for this entire technology, with contributions from others around the world. Secondly, the ramifications of this technology are so widespread that only a campus with broad excellence in all areas is adequate to engage the range of implications that this technology offers. UC Berkeley Library

Though the authors note that science involves both competition and collaboration, they avoid discussion of the myriad conflicts that exist in this exciting new fieldan absence that makes the rosy picture presented in this otherwise excellent book just a bit too unbelievable. Publishers Weekly

The larger purpose of A Crack in Creation, clearly, is to show that Doudna is the true hero of CRISPR. And ultimately, despite the book's flaws, I'm convinced. Nominators and the Nobel Committee will need to read this book. But CRISPR binge-watchers like me still await a truly satisfying account one that is insightful, candid and contextualized. Nature

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McCaskey grad writes new book on CRISPR and genome engineering - LancasterOnline

December 17, 1969 - July 14, 2017

Chris R. Badman, age 47, South Bend, formerly of DeWitt, passed away on July 14, 2017. Born Dec. 17, 1969, in Lincoln, to Randall and Marjorie (Bergmeier) Badman. Chris was a 1988 graduate of Tri County High School and earned a Bachelor of Science in Genetic Engineering from the University of Kansas. He most recently worked as a clinical field specialist at Natera. Chris had many hobbies including hunting, fishing, golfing, wakeboarding, snowboarding and was a licensed pilot. He loved all music, coaching sports, booze cruises, Husker football and KU basketball. He was an amazing father, son, and big brother who loved life and shared kindness and acceptance to all he met. His smile and love of adventure will be missed.

Survivors include his sons, Braxton Russell Badman and Trevin Cole Badman of Eagle; parents, Randy & Marge Badman of DeWitt; sister, Jennifer (Jenni) Badman Alley and niece, Matilda (Mattie) Alley of Olathe, Kan.; the mother of his sons, Amy Klasek Badman of Eagle; special friend, Michelle Grummert of Lincoln; uncles, Steven Melon Bergmeier and wife Teresa and Michael Tubby Bergmeier and wife Troy all of DeWitt; and a host of extended family and friends. He was preceded in death by his grandparents, Russell & Evelyn Badman and Arnold & Loretta Bergmeier; uncle, Allen Bergmeier and wife Sharon.

A celebration of life will be 3 p.m. Friday, July 21, at Trinity Lutheran Church, DeWitt. Family prayer service will be 2:45 p.m. Friday at the church. Burial of ashes will take place at a later date at Oak Grove Cemetery. There will be no viewing as cremation has taken place. A register book will be available from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. with family greeting from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Venrick-Griffiths-Hovendick Chapel in DeWitt. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions suggested to the Chris Badman Memorial Fund for the creation of a scholarship with the funeral home in charge. Online register book and video tribute at ghchapel.com.

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Chris R. Badman - Lincoln Journal Star

The dogs, which are test tube bred in a lab, have twice the muscle mass of their natural counterparts and are considerably stronger and faster.

The canine genome has been especially difficult to engineer and replicate but its close similarity to the human genome means it has long been the prize of geneticists.

Now the Chinese success has led to fears the same technology could be used to create super-humans.

David King, director of Human Genetics Alert (HGA), voiced his fears over what is widely viewed as the first step on s slippery slope.

He told the Express.co.uk: Its true that the more and more animals that are genetically engineered using these techniques brings us closer to the possibility of genetic engineering of humans.

Dogs are as a species, in respect of cloning are very difficult, and even more difficult to clone human beings.

Theres no medical case for it, the scientists are interested in being the first person in the world to create a genetically engineer child.

Theyre interested in science and the technology and their careers. They will continue pushing the regulations for it.

GETTY

That does set us on the road to eugenics. I am very concerned with what Im seeing.

An army of super-humans has been a staple of science fiction and superhero comics for decades but the super-dog technology brings it closer to reality.

The Chinese researchers first self-bred cloned dog was named Little Long Long.

The beagle puppy, one of 27, was genetically engineered by deleting a gene called myostatin, giving it double the muscle mass of a normal beagle.

The advance genetic editing technology has been touted as a breakthrough which could herald the dawn of superbreeds, which could be stronger, faster, better at running and hunting.

NC

The dogs could potentially be deployed to frontline service to assist police officers, scientists said.

Dr Lai Liangxue, researcher at Guangzhou institute of biological medicine and health, said: "This is a breakthrough, marking China as only the second country in the world to independently master dog-somatic clone technology, after South Korea."

Some 65 embryos were edited, and from that 27 were born, with Little Long Long the only one who was created without the myostatin gene. Myostatin is known to control muscle size in humans.

Dogs are one of the hardest animals to clone, with only South Korea thought to have successfully created a clone in the past.

As well as the enhancements, researchers said in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology some dogs will be bred with DNA mutations in a bid to help medical research, including some which mimic Parkinsons.

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Dr Lai added: "The goal of the research is to explore an approach to the generation of the new disease dog models for biomedical research.

"Dogs are very close to humans in terms of metabolic, physiological and anatomical characteristics."

But some have criticised the experiments, citing ethical concerns.

Mr King continued: This is the way its likely to proceed if the law is changed, first of all they will use it for medical purposes, most likely to treat a genetic condition.

GETTY

I am very concerned with what Im seeing

David King

In terms of genetic engineering we will be seeing this more and more.

There are also fears that, as well as medical, tinkering with genetics could also lead to a rise in designer or novelty pets.

Dr Lai said his team have no intentions to breed the bulked up beagles as pets.

But Mr King also voiced fears that this breakthrough, coupled with existing cases of altering human embryos, could lead to further calls for designer babies.

The director of HGA, and independent body, claimed there are multiple examples of eugenics going on already, citing women who are intelligent and beautiful are paid more for their eggs in the US.

Mr King said: Its not scaremongering.

Im seeing the beginning of a campaign within the scientific community to legalise human genetic engineering.

Weve seen how it happened with the thee-parent embryo.

NC

I can see the same thing building up with genetic engineering.

There are strict laws around cloning, but one example of a case in the UK is Dolly the sheep.

Born in 1996, she died aged six in 2003, half the normal life span of a Finn Dorset sheep.

And recently, an artificial womb for premature babies was tested on lambs, and showed significant success.

Lambs born at the equivalent of 23 weeks were placed inside the fake womb which contained fluid mimicking that found in an amniotic sac.

They remained inside for 28 days, and continued to develop, even growing white fleeces.

Guo Longpeng, the China press officer for the Asia division of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said: "Cloning is unethical.

"Like any other laboratory animal, these animals are caged and manipulated in order to provide a lucrative bottom line."

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China unveils technology to create SUPER-HUMANS via hyper-muscular test-tube dogs - Express.co.uk

University of Canberra scientists failed to comply with genetic engineering safety protocols while researching a mosquito-borne virus linked to brain damage.

It is one of dozens of compliance incidents involving genetically modified viruses, bacteria and crops that have occurred across Australia since 2011.

Fairfax Mediacan reveal 32 separate incidents of non-compliance committed by universities, government laboratories and large agricultural companies, including:

The risks associated with all 32 incidents reported have been assessed as "negligible" by the federal Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.

Many were minor incidents caused by administrative oversights.

The incidents have been described in reports published by the regulator as well as documents obtained by Fairfax Media under Freedom of Information laws.

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In 2015 the University of Canberra contravened GMO licence conditions during an experiment with the Murray Valley encephalitis virus, a mosquito-borne virus that can cause brain damage.

Scientists were attempting to create a new vaccine by engineering the virus with two genes from the virus that causes Dengue fever.

"At the time of the inspection the University of Canberra notified inspectors that dealings with GMOs had been undertaken in a facility that had not been authorised by the licence," a government inspection report read.

"The University of Canberra did not obtain signed statements from all persons, prior to their commencing dealings, indicating that they understood and agreed to be bound by licence conditions."

A spokeswoman for the university said the breach had been an "administrative oversight" that had been quickly corrected.

"Due to storage space issues in the licensed lab, some GMO material was stored in another certified lab which was appropriate for the material but not under the licence.

"The GMO material was only stored in this certified lab and no research on it was conducted in that location."

Last year agricultural giant Bayer Crop Science was moving planting equipment from a trial site in country NSW when a small batch of GM cotton seeds were spilled.

A report of the incident showed the seeds could have been spilled over a 29 kilometre patch of road in Moree, including the busy Newell Highway.

The seeds had been modified with genes linked to insect or herbicide resistance, although the regulator concluded it was "unlikely" any plants would have grown.

A spokesman for Bayer said the government had been alerted to the incident straight away and all possible risks had been addressed.

"Bayer worked proactively with the OGTR to ensure the risks, however negligible, were addressed and remedied, including monitoring for any [plants] that might come up subsequently."

The Nuseed agri-tech company was involved in an incident in 2016, in which sheep were mistakenly allowed to graze in a paddock containing GM canola in Colac Otway, Victoria.

"Nuseed self-reported the unintentional grazing of sheep on this site," an inspection report found.

"A small number of sheep were able to access the planting area due to an unplanned drop in water levels in a dam which had previously acted as a natural barrier."

Regulators concluded the incident posed a "negligible" risk to the environment.

Nuseed declined to comment when approached by Fairfax.

In 2016 there was a non-compliance incident at the University of South Australia in which material was taken out of a facility without labelling to indicate it contained GM material.

"Persons conducting dealings with the GMO who are not fully trained in licence conditions are at risk if exposed to the GM organism," a government report concluded.

"There is no evidence, however, to suggest this issue has resulted in any harm to human health and safety at this stage."

Simon Terry is a former investment banker now running New Zealand's Sustainability Council advocacy group.

Mr Terry said the risks of genetically modified material entering the environment were more likely to be economic, rather than linked to health or safety.

"Food markets in wealthier countries are very sensitive to GMO content," he said.

"Markets for premium foods simply reject products that contain any detectable level of GMO contamination and whole countries, such as France, operate this way.

"Food producers are especially at risk from GMO varieties that have not been legally approved in the country the exports are going to.

"It is common for countries to test for GMOs at the border and if a GMO that has not been approved is discovered, the entire shipment is rejected."

Australia is currently undertaking a "technical review" of its federal gene technology regulations, with a view to ensuring they reflect technological and scientific advancements.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator said none of the 32 incidents of non-compliance reported since 2011 represented a failure of the current regime.

"Australia's regulatory system is considered world leading with a science and risk based approach that is timely and predictable, providing a clear regulatory pathway for the industry to follow," she said.

"The OGTR continues to work closely with our major trading partners to ensure its regulatory practices remain current and relevant and reflects international practice in relation to the regulation of GMOs."

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32 genetic engineering incidents since 2011 revealed in regulator's ... - The Canberra Times

AsianScientist (July 17, 2017) - Researchers in China have developed a genetic engineering approach to make purple rice that produces high levels of antioxidants. Their work is published in the journal Molecular Plant.

Rice is a staple food in Asia, making it a good agent for delivering micronutrients that are beneficial to health. However, not all micronutrients are produced in large quantities by rice.

To date, genetic engineering approaches have been used to develop rice enriched in beta-carotene and folate (precursors of vitamins A and B), but not anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are natural antioxidants that have the potential to decrease the risk of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other chronic disorders.

Although these health-promoting compounds are naturally abundant in some black and red rice varieties, they are absent in polished rice grains because the husk, bran and germ have been removed, leaving only the endospermthe fleshy part at the center of the grain.

In this study, researchers developed a method to deliver many genes at once and used it to make rice endosperm produce high levels of anthocyanins. Previous attempts to engineer anthocyanin production in rice have failed because the underlying biosynthesis pathway is highly complex and it has been difficult to efficiently transfer many genes into plants.

To address this challenge, Professor Liu Yao-Guang and his colleagues at the South China Agricultural University first set out to identify the genes required to engineer anthocyanin production in the rice endosperm. To do so, they analyzed sequences of anthocyanin pathway genes in different rice varieties and pinpointed the defective genes in japonica and indica subspecies that do not produce anthocyanins.

Based on this analysis, they developed a transgene stacking strategy for expressing eight anthocyanin pathway genes specifically in the endosperm of the japonica and indica rice varieties. The resulting purple endosperm rice had high anthocyanin levels and antioxidant activity in the endosperm.

We have developed a highly efficient, easy-to-use transgene stacking system called TransGene Stacking II that enables the assembly of a large number of genes in single vectors for plant transformation, said Liu. This is the first demonstration of engineering such a complex metabolic pathway in plants. We envisage that this vector system will have many potential applications in this era of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.

In the future, this transgene stacking vector system could be used to develop plant bioreactors for the production of many other important nutrients and medicinal ingredients. The researchers plan to evaluate the safety of purple endosperm rice as biofortified food and they will also try to engineer the biosynthesis of anthocyanins in other crops to produce more purple endosperm cereals such as maize, wheat and barley.

The article can be found at: Zhu et al. (2017) Development of Purple Endosperm Rice by Engineering Anthocyanin Biosynthesis in the Endosperm with a High-Efficiency Transgene Stacking System.

Source: Cell Press; Photo: Zhu Qinlong. Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

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Genetically Modified Rice Stacked With Antioxidants - Asian Scientist Magazine

In this Market Foolery segment, host Chris Hill and Motley Fool Rule Breakers' Aaron Bush talk about where genetic engineering is heading -- which is out of the lab and toward really curing diseases. Yes, it's early days. But the potential for CRISPR could be enormous. But there are some interesting speedbumps involved for biotech investors.

A full transcript follows the video.

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Chris Hill:Every once in awhile,I like to walk by your desk and ask you, "Whatare you working on right now? What's something that's caught your interest?" And you had brought up this,[laughs] frankly,you brought up a word I had never heard before, and that is CRISPR. I should say, anacronym I'd never seen before. CRISPR stands for --stick with me, folks -- clusteredregularly interspacedshort palindromic repeats. Let's do this again, shall we? CRISPR:clustered regularly interspacedshort palindromicrepeats, which isessentially a very fancy way of referring to biotech engineering.

Theanalogy that our colleague Michael Douglass mentioned to me, and also appearedin the article I read is that,imagine a DNA strand,and you have this microscopic pair of scissors, and it enables you to snip out one little piece of the DNA,and you can do any number of things with that,depending on which DNA we're talking about. Thispotentially has ramifications for food supply, for disease, formedicines, for treatments, all that sort of thing. Tell mewhere this space is right now, andwhat you're watching when it comes to this space. Biotech engineering has been, I would say, maybe not at the forefront of the news,but certainly 15 years ago or so, when we were going to sequence the human genome, whatthat was such a dominant story, I think since then, this is an industry that investors haveat least had on their radarto some degree or another.

Aaron Bush: Right.I think it's still new enough tonot be super relevant for investors. Butevery day or week that passes by, itbecomes slightly morerelevant. I think for the most part, theprogress has been mostly restricted to labs,getting the fundamental technology itself to work,where you can actually change the genes in whatever creature. But,it is starting to move out more into the mainstream,and it's starting to become more relevant andcreating cures for diseases andactually doing things with it. In my opinion, it'skind of like a big idea at this point. There isn't a lot to back it up. But,if you do play it forward, it is one of those really big ideas. It'sprobably on parwith augmented reality, or machine learning, or cryptocurrencies, even, that can just disrupt the way that things are done at a fundamental level. So, I'm excited to see where it runs. But it'sstill definitely the early days.

Hill: And that wasanother thing Michael Douglass mentions. He said, "This is super early stage," and there are pure-playcompanies out there, one of which wassmart enough to get the nameCRISPR Therapeutics(NASDAQ: CRSP), so kudos towhoever nailed that one. But,you were saying before we started taping that there's a move right now to create a patent pool, because you could see where, for some companies,this could become incredibly lucrative. You could also see a situation where --and it sounds like this is maybepart of what is driving the move toward a patent pool --everything could just get tangled up in legal "he-said, she-said, that's my patent" stuff.

Bush: Right. One of the main blockers to the development of CRISPR is an ongoing fight over patent rights.I think we're at thepoint where things are getting slowand getting caught up legally. As you can imagine,there are several universities, labs,biotech companies justclamoring over this, trying to pile onas quickly as possible, because it is going to beone of the next big things. And right now,there are a few exclusive licensesthat are probably too broad in the market, and should probably be re-evaluated so that there aren't specific gatekeepers to the technology. So, yeah, this needs to form a patent pool and simplify thelicensing process, could ease that patent logjam and really helpaccelerate CRISPR's developmentacross everything, across the entire space. So, right now,this is still at the proposal level, andI don't know how quickly that's going to move,because there are a lot of players here. There's still negotiation to be done, but ifthe negotiations go well,I think this could start to become much more relevant for investors sooner. Andsomething with the biotech space in general is, you do need to invest early to get the big results. And if you wait until there's a drug on the market that works, you just missed a several-billion-dollar run-up. So, it isimportant to be watching these early moves. Andseeing how all the different players, theEditas, the CRISPRTherapeutics, and others, howthey're going to shake out in this patent pool issue.

Hill: It sounds like, as investors, we should be rooting for the patent pool to come to fruition, because that's going toaccelerate the process, instead of being --and I'm just pulling these numbers out of thin air -- 10 years away fromtreatments being on the market, we are five to seven years away.

Bush: Yeah.I think it's hard to put specific numbers on it, but yes,that's definitely the idea. It'll allow companies tomore quickly start building their owntechnologies and their own patents on top of a larger pool that's available to everyone.

Hill: To make this both more real and more fun, oneexample that I dug upwhen I was clicking around this morning, anarticle from Scientific American --which is six years old, by the way. I'm angry that no one in my life flagged this article for me. It was basically how researchers took thefluorescent proteins that appear injellyfish genes andinserted them into a common household cat. And so, boom,glow-in-the-dark cat. I mean,who's not excited about that?

Bush: What elsecan you ask for?

Hill: Actually,our man behind the glass, Dan Boyd,when I mentioned that to him, he was like, "No.I have no interest in a glow-in-the-dark cat, they'reenough trouble as they are at nighttime. Add theglow-in-the-dark feature and that'snot sweetening the deal for me." Reallyinteresting stuff. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Aaron Bush has no position in any stocks mentioned. Chris Hill has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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This Is Why Investors Will Need to Learn a New Acronym: CRISPR - Madison.com

The dogs, which are test tube bred in a lab, have twice the muscle mass of their natural counterparts and are considerably stronger and faster.

The canine genome has been especially difficult to engineer and replicate but its close similarity to the human genome means it has long been the prize of geneticists.

Now the Chinese success has led to fears the same technology could be used to create weaponised super-humans - typifed in Marvel Comics by Captain America and his foes.

MARVELEYEVINE

David King, director of Human Genetics Alert (HGA), voiced his fears over what is widely viewed as the first step on a slippery slope.

He told express.co.uk: Its true that the more and more animals that are genetically engineered using these techniques brings us closer to the possibility of genetic engineering of humans.

Dogs as a species, in respect of cloning are very difficult, and even more difficult to clone human beings.

Theres no medical case for it, the scientists are interested in being the first person in the world to create a genetically engineer child.

In terms of genetic engineering we will be seeing this more and more

David King, director of Human Genetics Alert

Theyre interested in science and the technology and their careers. They will continue pushing the regulations for it.

That does set us on the road to eugenics. I am very concerned with what Im seeing.

An army of super-humans has been a staple of science fiction and superhero comics for decades but the super-dog technology brings it closer to reality.

The Chinese researchers first self-bred cloned dog was named Little Long Long.

SINO GENE

The beagle puppy, one of 27, was genetically engineered by deleting a gene called myostatin, giving it double the muscle mass of a normal beagle.

The advance genetic editing technology has been touted as a breakthrough which could herald the dawn of superbreeds, which could be stronger, faster, better at running and hunting.

The Chinese official line is that the dogs could potentially be deployed to frontline service to assist police officers.

Dr Lai Liangxue, researcher at Guangzhou institute of biological medicine and health, said: "This is a breakthrough, marking China as only the second country in the world to independently master dog-somatic clone technology, after South Korea."

VCG via Getty Images

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Armed police soldiers lift timbers during a drill on August 24, 2016 in Chongqing, China. As the highest temperatures reached over 40 degree Celsius at 5 districts in Chongqing, officers and soldiers of an armed police crop took outdoor training

Some 65 embryos were edited, and from that 27 were born, with Little Long Long the only one who was created without the myostatin gene. Myostatin is known to control muscle size in humans.

Dogs are one of the hardest animals to clone, with only South Korea thought to have successfully created a clone in the past.

As well as the enhancements, researchers said in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology some dogs will be bred with DNA mutations in a bid to help medical research, including some which mimic Parkinsons.

Dr Lai added: "The goal of the research is to explore an approach to the generation of the new disease dog models for biomedical research.

GETTY

"Dogs are very close to humans in terms of metabolic, physiological and anatomical characteristics."

But some have criticised the experiments, citing ethical concerns.

Mr King said: This is the way its likely to proceed if the law is changed, first of all they will use it for medical purposes, most likely to treat a genetic condition.

In terms of genetic engineering we will be seeing this more and more.

There are also fears that, as well as medical, tinkering with genetics could also lead to a rise in designer or novelty pets.

Dr Lai said his team have no intentions to breed the bulked up beagles as pets.

But Mr King also voiced fears that this breakthrough, coupled with existing cases of altering human embryos, could lead to further calls for designer babies.

The director of HGA, and independent body, claimed there are multiple examples of eugenics going on already, citing women who are intelligent and beautiful are paid more for their eggs in the US.

Mr King said: Its not scaremongering.

Im seeing the beginning of a campaign within the scientific community to legalise human genetic engineering.

Weve seen how it happened with the thee-parent embryo.

SINO GENE

I can see the same thing building up with genetic engineering.

There are strict laws around cloning, but one example of a case in the UK is Dolly the sheep.

Born in 1996, she died aged six in 2003, half the normal life span of a Finn Dorset sheep.

And recently, an artificial womb for premature babies was tested on lambs, and showed significant success.

Lambs born at the equivalent of 23 weeks were placed inside the fake womb which contained fluid mimicking that found in an amniotic sac.

They remained inside for 28 days, and continued to develop, even growing white fleeces.

Guo Longpeng, the China press officer for the Asia division of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said: "Cloning is unethical.

"Like any other laboratory animal, these animals are caged and manipulated in order to provide a lucrative bottom line."

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China unveils gene technology to create SUPERHUMANS with hyper-muscular test-tube dogs - Express.co.uk