Daily Archives: September 24, 2014

TIME Ideas Science If Synthetic Biology Lets Us Play God, We Need Rules MOLEKUULBrand X/Getty Images

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

Synthetic biology has been called genetic engineering on steroids. Its also been described as so difficult to pin down that five scientists would give you six different definitions. No matter how this emerging field is characterized, one thing is clear: the ability to synthesize and sequence DNA is driving scientific research in brand-new and exciting directions.

In California, scientists have created a breakthrough antimalarial drugbakers yeast made in a lab that contains the genetic material of the opium poppy. The drug has the potential to save millions of livesand to ensure drug production that independent of poppy flowers. At MIT, researchers are working on a way for plants to fix their own nitrogen, so farmers will no longer need to use artificial fertilizers. And, in the far future, scientists and NASA researchers are looking to create a digital biological teleporter to bring to Earth life forms detected on Mars via a sort of biological fax.

What should we worrying about in this moment of tremendous, and potentially cataclysmic, scientific discovery? In advance of the Zcalo/Arizona State University event How Will Synthetic Biology Change the Way We Live?, we asked experts the following question: Soon well be able to program DNA with the same ease we program computers. What new responsibilities will be imposed on us?

1) Stepping ahead of technology to imagine the world we want to live in

Synthetic biology sees life as an engineering project a repertoire of processes that can be reprogrammed to produce technologies and products. It envisions powerful new tools for constructing biological parts. Many in synthetic biology celebrate technologies like automated DNA synthesis as agents of democratization, potentially allowing easy and widespread access to custom-made DNA. According to their vision, these technologies will enable bioengineers to freely experiment with living systems, accelerating progress in innovation and producing enormous benefits for society.

But there are risks. The question is often raised: How can we prevent these technologies from falling into the wrong hands? DNA synthesis machines cannot distinguish between tinkerers and terrorists. Though this question is crucially important, it is revealing for what it leaves unasked. Why are synthetic biologys tinkerers presumed to be the safe hands for shaping the technological future? Why do we defer to their visions and judgments over those that we collectively develop?

We tend to focus governance not on projects of innovation, but on how resulting technologies might be used in society. By attending primarily to technologys misuses, impacts, and consequences, we confine ourselves to waiting until new problemsand responsibilitiesare imposed upon us. Science is empowered to act, but society only to react. This leaves unexamined the question of who gets to imagine the future and, therefore, who has the authority to declare what benefits lie ahead, what risks are realistic, and what worries are reasonable and warrant public deliberation?

Our imaginations of the future shape our priorities in the present. It is a task of democracy, not science, to imagine the world we want to live in. Genuine democratization demands that we embrace this difficult task as our own, rather than wait to react to the responsibilities that emerging technologies impose upon us.

Go here to see the original:
If Synthetic Biology Lets Us Play God, We Need Rules

With genetically engineered therapies for the infectious disease, Ebola, currently undergoing testing for safety and efficacy, GMO Answers is highlighting the use of genetic engineering in other biomedical applications. The posts author, Richard Green, also looks at whyGMOs, though used in both agriculture and medicine, are more controversial in agricultural applications.

The technology of genetic modification orgenetic engineeringwas first developed in the early 1970s, commercialized in pharmaceutical applications in the early 1980s, and then agricultural applications in the early 1990s.

The technology has been around for 40 years. It is hardly new. Perhaps if you compare it to the internal combustion engine it is new, but compared to something as recent and ubiquitous as flat screen HDTVs, DVRs, andWi-Fi-friendly touch screen devices like iPhones and Tablets, it is a time tested technology.

In medicine,genetic engineering(GE) is used to make biopharmaceutical drugs. Various organisms are engineered for use as factories to produce the drug product.Bacteriaare the preferred option, as they are the easiest to grow and scale-up for production, but depending on the complexity of the drugs molecular structure, other organisms such as yeasts, mammalian cells,etc., can also be used toexpressthe drug product. The first GE drug approved for use wasinsulin. By the year 2000, there were over100GE drugs on the market. Currently, peoples lives are changed every day by drugs likeRemicade,Epo,Avastin, andNeulasta

Whilegenetic engineeringis used in both agriculture and medicine, it is far more controversial in agriculture. Here is an explanation that helped shape my point of view: intellectually, I can grasp that adding or silencing a few well-characterizedgenesout of thousands is a drop in thegenomebucket, but for me it makes it a bit more real to think of it in terms of people. Just look at the variety among us. Variations between our thousands ofgenesare why we are all different from each other, but even with those differences, we are all human. It is similar with plants. Changing one, or as we get better, a few genes, in the plantgenomeis barely a blip compared to the normal diversity between individuals. To paraphrase what a wise man once said,GE corn is just corn.

We encourage you to visit our GMO Answers site and read GMOs in Food and Medicine: An Overview in its entirety.

View post:
GMO Answers Provides an Overview of GMOs in Medicine

8 hours ago Before (top) and after (bottom) images of gold nanoprobe tests. In DNA samples containing no genetic variations, the pink solution became colorless within 10 minutes. Credit: A*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology

Tests for identifying genetic variations among individuals, which can be used to develop precisely targeted drug therapies, are a current focus in the emerging field of pharmacogenomics. A*STAR researchers have now developed and patented a customized and elegant nanoprobe for assessing sensitivity to the drug warfarin.

To develop the nanoprobe, Jackie Ying at the A*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and co-workers in Singapore, Taiwan and Japan devised a relatively simple procedure that uses standard laboratory equipment and can be easily adapted for other genetic tests.

"Our method is faster, more cost-effective and more accurate than existing alternatives," says Ying.

Ying's method detects genetic variations known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that differ in only a single-nucleotide building block of DNA. In the case of warfarinthe most frequently prescribed anticoagulantthere are SNP differences in specific parts of the genome that indicate whether a patient will tolerate the drug or suffer serious side effects.

The researchers used gold nanoparticles attached to short sections of DNA that bind to specific complementary sequences of DNA through the base pairing that holds together double-stranded DNA. These nanoprobes were exposed to fragments of DNA that had been cut out and amplified from a patient's genome.

The nanoprobes are initially pink due to surface plasmonic effects involving ripples of electric charge. When analyzed, if the probes do not bind to the DNA fragments, they aggregate and become colorless on exposure to a salt solution. If they do bind to the target, they will not aggregate but will remain pink until heated to a 'melting temperature' at which the base pairing is disrupted and the DNA strands of the probe and the genome fragments separate. For cases of partial complementarityin which the fragments are mismatched by a single nucleotidethe melting temperature is lowered by an amount depending on the level of mismatch. This allows SNPs to be detected through their different melting temperatures.

The resulting color change is easily visible to the human eye but can also be evaluated automatically (see image). The system can also distinguish between homozygous genotypes (where a person caries the same SNP on each member of a pair of chromosomes) and heterozygous genotypes (where a person carries different SNPs on each chromosome).

"The patented warfarin test kit is available for commercialization or licensing," says Ying. "We have developed and are validating assay kits for several other applications in pathogen detection, pharmacogenomics and genetic disease screening."

Explore further: Using gold nanoprobes to unlock your genetic profile

See the original post here:
Gold nanoparticles linked to single-stranded DNA create a simple but versatile genetic testing kit