Monthly Archives: February 2021

In early January 2021, a consultation was launched that asks whether organisms produced by genetic engineering should continue to be classified as genetically modified, if the organisms could have been developed using traditional breeding methods.

The consultation is especially focused on gene editing, also known as genome editing, a technology that allows scientists to add, remove or alter an organisms DNA.

Unlike older types of transgenic genetic modification, this process doesnt introduce foreign DNA into the gene. In a speech launching the consultation, Environment Secretary George Eustice said gene editing raises far fewer ethical or biological concerns than transgenic modification and respects the rules of nature.

In 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited crops should be considered the same as other genetically modified crops under EU law, a ruling Eustice called flawed and stifling to scientific progress.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson shares a similar view. In 2019 he pledged to liberate the UKs extraordinary bioscience sector from anti-genetic-modification rules.

Read more about gene editing:

Gene editing is a relatively new and fast-evolving technology. The first type of gene editing, using CRISPR/Cas9, was only developed in 2012 (the two women that developed it won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

Views on regulating the use of gene editing in producing genetically modified animals or crops have generally fallen into two camps, says Prof Katherine Denby from the University of York, who works on new ways to improve crops using tools such as gene editing.

The first camp argues that as gene-edited crops or livestock could have arisen through traditional breeding processes, they should not be classed as genetically modified organisms, meaning they wouldnt be subject to genetic modification regulations.

The second camp holds that any organism made through gene editing should be regulated as a genetically modified organism, regardless of whether the final product could have been made using traditional breeding. Countries such as the US, Australia and Japan have taken the former, more relaxed, approach, while the EU has taken the latter, more stringent one.

Current UK regulations mean gene-edited crops can technically come to market, but the regulatory process is both lengthy and extremely costly, says Denby.

Its really prohibiting the development of products, both crops and genome-edited livestock, just because of that cost, she says. This, in turn, is prohibiting the development of traits that are for public good, such as disease resistance, she says.

Gene editing could potentially offer greater food security for the UK, but are there unseen dangers? Getty Images

For example, her own work aims to replicate the disease resistance found in older and wild relatives of lettuce in more modern varieties, a process that will go many times faster using gene editing rather than traditional breeding.

But other scientists are more sceptical about the benefits that gene editing can bring and are concerned about its potential dangers.

This technology comes with innate risks to alter the genetic composition, the patterns of gene function, says Dr Michael Antoniou, head of the gene expression and therapy group at Kings College London. In doing so you change the plants biochemistry.

Antoniou says gene editing is not as highly precise as is often claimed and can bring about unintended mutations. Worryingly, those who are developing gene-edited crops and foods are ignoring the risks, he says.

For instance, gene editing could run the risk of producing novel toxins or allergens, or increasing the levels of pre-existing toxins and allergens, especially in plants, he says.

Without strict safety checks, its possible that crops that are potentially harmful could enter the marketplace unlabelled and would therefore also be difficult to trace if any adverse outcomes were to be found, he adds.

In Antonious view, gene editing is unquestionably a genetic modification procedure and should continue being regulated in the UK as it is in the EU.

But many scientists argue that gene editing is crucial to supporting a more sustainable food system.

Genome editing is already used in medicine and has immense potential for tackling major agricultural challenges related to food security, climate change and sustainability, says Prof Denis Murphy from the University of South Wales.

Read more fromReality Check:

Denby agrees and says gene editing can play a part in making the UKs food system more sustainable, healthy and affordable, while admitting its not going to be a magic bullet.

But for Antoniou the focus really needs to be on the agricultural system as a whole, rather than improving individual crops and seeds.

Gareth Morgan, head of farming and land use policy at the Soil Association, has called gene editing a sticking plaster that diverts vital investment and attention from other more effective solutions.

The focus needs to be on how to restore exhausted soils, improve diversity in cropping, integrate livestock into rotations and reduce dependence on synthetic nitrogen and pesticides, he says. We want to see immediate progress in these areas rather than using Brexit to pursue a deregulatory agenda for genetic modification.

Visit the BBCs Reality Check website at bit.ly/reality_check_ or follow them on Twitter@BBCRealityCheck

Go here to read the rest:
Gene editing: Should livestock and crops be genetically engineered in the UK? - BBC Focus Magazine

If the double helix is an icon of the modern age, then the genome is one of the last grand narratives of modernity, writes Lara Choksey in her new book, Narrative in the Age of the Genome. Hybridizing literary criticism with a genre-spanning consideration of a dozen distinct literary works, and imbued throughout with deep concern for the peripheral, the possible, and the political, the book seeks to challenge the whole imaginative apparatus for constructing the self into a coherent narrative, via the lexicon and syntax of the molecular.

To a reading of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976) as a repudiation of class struggle and E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology (1975) as a defense of warfare, Choksey juxtaposes another kind of ambiguous heterotopia in which genetic engineering is a tool of neoliberal self-fashioning. In Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton (1976), Bron, a transgender ex-gigolo turned informatics expert, is caught between sociobiology and the selfish gene, between the liberal developmentalism of progressive evolution, and the neoliberal extraction and rearrangement of biological information. Even the undulating interruptions and parentheticals of Bron's thoughts [mimic] the description of the activation and silencing of genes, she suggests, tying together gene and genre in a way that encapsulates neoliberal alienation.

Choksey next explores the ways in which collectivist fantasies of biological reinvention under Soviet Lysenkoism fused code and cultivation through a close reading of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (1972) in which cultivated utopian dreamworlds become contaminated by alien forces, resulting in fundamental ecological transformations beyond the promised reach of human control. The novel brings to light not forgotten Soviet utopias but literal zombies and mutations. In a world where planned cultivation fails entirely in the face of the unfamiliar, even as new biological weapons are being developed, Earth itself viscerally reflects a fractured reality of lost promisesa world in crisis with all meaning gone, and survival itself a chancy proposition.

Framed as a family history, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is actually a horror story, argues Choksey.

As the promise of precision medicine emerged, so too did new forms of memoir. In Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and the film Gattaca (1997), for example, the traditional aspirational narrative of a pilgrim's progress is subverted: As the unitary subject disappears into data, algorithms, and commodities, a new grammar of existence emerges, albeit one in which the inherited problems of the pastracism, ableism, and the fiction of heteronormativityremain ever-present.

In Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2006) and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016), Choksey sees a reorientation of genomics away from the reduction of self to code and toward new forms of kinship and belonging that offer a reckoning with the histories of brutalization and displacement upon which liberal humanism is founded. Even as genomics seeks to locate the trauma of enslavement at the level of the molecular, communities seeking reunion and reparation know that technology alone cannot do the cultural work of caring for history that narrative can offer.

Reading Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) as a biography of Black horror which tries, time and again, to resolve itself as family romance, Choksey identifies the perils of narratives unable to recognize their own genre. She argues that by blurring the lines not between fact and fiction but between horror and family history, the dehumanization of Black lives as experimental biomatter echoes inescapably with larger histories of the extraction of Black flesh for the expansion of colonial-capitalist production.

What emerges as most compelling out of this entire tapestry of readings is the author's interpretation of the limits and failures of the extraordinary cultural power of the genome. Concluding that genomics has privileged a particular conception of the human that is in the process of being reconfigured, Choksey ventures that the uncomplicated subject, the Vitruvian Man of the Human Genome Project, has reached its end. What is left is neither dust, stardust, nor a face erased in the sand (as Foucault would have it) but rather whatever might emerge next from the unwieldy kaleidoscope of possible meanings.

Originally posted here:
Genomics and genre - Science

Ninety years ago, in August of 1931, physics professor Ernest Lawrence created the Radiation Laboratory in a modest building on the UC Berkeley campus to house his cyclotron, a particle accelerator that ushered in a new era in the study of subatomic particles. The invention of the cyclotron would go on to win Lawrence the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics.

From this start, Lawrences unique approach of bringing together multidisciplinary teams, world-class research facilities, and bold discovery science has fueled nine decades of pioneering research at the Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). His team science approach also grew into todays national laboratory system.

Over the years, as Berkeley Labs mission expanded to cover a remarkable range of science, this approach has delivered countless solutions to challenges in energy, environment, materials, biology, computing, and physics.

And this same approach will continue to deliver breakthroughs for decades to come.

In 2021, Berkeley Labs 90th year, we invite you to join our anniversary celebration, Berkeley Lab: The Next 90, as we celebrate our past and imagine our future.

The pursuit of discovery science by multidisciplinary teams has brought, and will continue to bring, tremendous benefits to the nation and world, said Berkeley Lab Director Mike Witherell. Our celebration is a chance to honor everyone who has contributed to solving human problems through science, and to imagine what we can accomplish together in the next 90 years.

Berkeley Labs 90th anniversary celebration honors the diverse efforts of the Lab community: from scientists and engineers to administrative and operations staff.

It also celebrates our commitment to discovery science, which explores the fundamental underpinnings of the universe, materials, biology, and more. This research requires patience the dividends can be decades in the future but the results are often surprising and profound, from the cyclotron of yesteryear to todays CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering technology.

Its an incredible story were proud to share, and inspired to continue with your support. Over the next several months, well offer many ways to join our celebration. Visit Berkeley Lab: The Next 90 to learn more, and engage with us on Twitter at #BerkeleyLab90.

Here are several ways to join our celebration, all highlighted on the website:

Celebrate the past

90 Breakthroughs: To celebrate Berkeley Labs nine decades of transforming discovery science into solutions that benefit the world, well roll out 90 Berkeley Lab breakthroughs over the next several months.

Interactive Timeline: Explore the Labs many remarkable achievements and events through the decades.

History and photos: Check out our decade-by-decade photo album and historical material.

Imagine the Future

Charitable giving: In 2021, Berkeley Lab will support five non-profit organizations that help prepare young scholars to become leaders and problem solvers.

Basics 2 Breakthroughs: Research at Berkeley Lab often starts with basic science, which leads to breakthroughs that help the world. In this video series, early career scientists discuss their game-changing research and what inspires them.

A Day in the Half Life: This podcast series chronicles the incredible and often unexpected ways that science evolves over time, as told by scientists who helped shape a research field, and those who will bring it into the future.

Speaker series: These monthly lectures offer a look at game-changing scientific breakthroughs of the last 90 years, highlight current research aimed at tackling the nations most pressing challenges, and offer a glimpse into future research that will spur discoveries yet to be made.

Connect

Virtual tours: These live, interactive tours will enable you to learn more about Berkeley Labs research efforts, hear from the scientists who conduct this important work, and peek inside our amazing facilities.

Social media: Join us on social media for fun and engaging content that will help you discover the Labs incredible history, and learn what were imagining for the future. BerkeleyLab#90

# # #

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams,Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryand its scientists have been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Labs facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science.

DOEs Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visitenergy.gov/science.

See more here:
Berkeley Lab Celebrates 90th Anniversary, Imagines the Next 90 Years | Berkeley Lab - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said "What I cannot create, I do not understand". Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can "break" under a set of conditions. However, Turing was not able to test his ideas, and it took over 70 years before a breakthrough in biology technique was able to evaluate them decisively. Can Turing's dream be made a reality through Feynman's proposal? Genetic engineering has proved it can.

Now, a research team from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint centre of UPF and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has developed a new type of model and its implementation using synthetic biology can reproduce the symmetry breakage observed in embryos with the minimum amount of ingredients possible.

The research team has managed to implement via synthetic biology (by introducing parts of genes of other species into the E. coli bacteria) a mechanism to generate spatial patterns observed in more complex animals, such as Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) or humans. In the study, the team observed that the strains of modified E. coli, which normally grow in (symmetrical) circular patterns, do as in the shape of a flower with petals at regular intervals, just as Turing had predicted.

"We wanted to build symmetry breaking that is never seen in colonies of E. coli, but is seen in patterns of animals, and then to discover which are the essential ingredients needed to generate these patterns", says Salva Duran-Nebreda, who conducted this research for his doctorate in the Complex Systems laboratory and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the IBE Evolution of Technology laboratory.

Bacteria E. coli forming patterns induced by the new synthetic system. Credit: Jordi Pla /ACS.

Using the new synthetic platform, the research team was able to identify the parameters that modulate the emergence of spatial patterns in E. coli . "We have seen that by modulating three ingredients we can induce symmetry breaking. In essence, we have altered cell division, adhesion between cells and long-distance communication capacity (quorum sensing), that is to say, perceive when there is a collective decision", Duran-Nebreda comments.

The observations made in the E. coli model could be applied to more complex animal models or to insect colony design principles. "In the same way that organoids or miniature organs can help us develop therapies without having to resort to animal models, this synthetic system paves the way to understanding as universal a phenomenon as embryonic development in a far simpler in vitro system", says Ricard Sol, ICREA researcher with the Complex Systems group at the IBE, and head of the research.

The model developed in this study, the first of its kind, could be key to understanding some embryonic development events. "We must think of this synthetic system as a platform for learning to design different fundamental biological mechanisms that generate structures, such as the step from a zygote to the formation of a complete organism. Moreover, such knowledge on the frontier between mechanical and biological processes, could be very useful for understanding developmental disorders", Duran-Nebreda concludes.

Reference: Duran-Nebreda S, Pla J, Vidiella B, Piero J, Conde-Pueyo N, Sol R. Synthetic Lateral Inhibition in Periodic Pattern Forming Microbial Colonies. ACS Synth Biol. 2021. doi:10.1021/acssynbio.0c00318.

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

See the rest here:
Synthetic Biology Used To Develop a New Type of Genetic Design - Technology Networks

In a Jan. 30, 2021, TikTok video, user niklongo blew the minds of his collective audience with a purported scientific development by Dutch scientists:

You wanna have your mind blown?

Dutch scientists have located and isolated the gene that makes fireflies able to glow, recombined the DNA, and put that DNA in plants, literally creating glow-in-the-dark trees. Eco-friendly outdoor nightlights!

Follow for more!

Broadly speaking, these claims stem primarily from confused and overhyped reporting that, at the time of the TikTok video, was over six years old. While scientists have inserted genes into plants that create a faint glow, glowing trees remain theoretical. The imagery used in the video stems from artwork inspired by but not created with this largely theoretical technology. Below, we break down all the problems with the assertions in the video:

Two words in, and already we are in trouble. The video asserts that Dutch scientists are responsible for locating and isolating the gene that makes fireflies able to glow. This is incorrect. The videos Dutch connection is an artist and designer named Daan Roosegaarde who did not actually locate or isolate any genes, or put said genes in a tree. Some of the images used in the TikTok video were created by Roosegaarde, but these were created by literally shining lights on trees as part of an art installation called Glowing Nature.

In 2014, Roosegaarde received a splash of U.S. media coverage while promoting his work at that years SXSW festival in Austin, TX. During an interview in which he discussed using biologically inspired technology to solve environmental problems, he explained that the idea of using glowing trees as street lamps was inspired in part by the work of former SUNY Stony Brook professor Alexander Krichevsky, who in 2011 left his academic post to start a company named Bioglow. The company developed the worlds first autoluminescent (light producing) plants, according to an archived version of the companys website.

Bioglow apparently no longer exists, but it did produce and sell a limited run of faintly glowing plants. Unlike the imagery shown in the TikTok, the glowing effect in these plants was significantly more modest. Some people over 40 may not be able to see the glow, explained a Bioglow promotional video from August 2015:

In the 2014 SXSW video, Roosegaarde held one of these early Bioglow plants as an example of biomimicry that inspires his art. Several reporters apparently falsely concluded that the Bioglow plant was an invention that Roosegaarde conceived of and helped to develop. This does not appear to be accurate. While some reports suggested there were or are theoretical plans for the artist and the scientist to collaborate on a really large [autoluminescent plant] like a tree which glows at night instead of standard street lighting, there is no indication anything came of this collaboration, if it materialized at all.

Contact information for Krichevsky was not readily apparent. We reached out to Roosegaardes studio for more information on their work together and will update our piece if we receive new information.

Contrary to the claim in the TikTok video, the creation of genetically modified glowing plants does not, at any point, introduce genes sourced from fireflies. Part of the confusion is that several academic or commercial enterprises are attempting, or have attempted, to create glowing plants. All of these efforts involve, in some way, the chemical luciferase, which reacts with a group of chemicals termed luciferins in a way that generates light. This chemical mechanism, generally speaking, is responsible for bioluminescence in several organisms, including fireflies.

Several glowing plant projects attempt to create luminescence by directly injecting or applying luciferins and luciferase into or on them. One of the most notable efforts using this sort of methodology comes from the laboratory of Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT developing a nanoparticle delivery mechanism. These efforts have also received significant (and more recent) media coverage, but this work is not actually genetic engineering.

As far as we are aware, the only person to attempt to use genetic engineering to create glowing plants is Krichevsky. The central difference in his approach compared to those that apply luciferin-related chemicals is that Krichevskys plants are autoluminescent. In other words, he modified the genes of a plant in a way that allows it to create its own luciferins and luciferase.

However, the genetic material inserted into the plants genome does not come from fireflies. Krichevsky published his methodology for engineering his plants in a 2010 paper. The genes it uses are sourced from the bioluminescent marine bacteria Photobacterium leiognathi. In neither method would it be accurate to say genes are isolated from fireflies.

A commonly invoked vision for people involved in glowing plant research is a future where energy consumption is reduced thanks to glowing trees that could serve as self-powered streetlamps.

Speaking to the outlet Dezeen in 2014, Krichevsky explained, In the long term we see use of glowing plants in contemporary lighting design, namely in landscaping and architecture as well as in transportation, marking driveways and highways with natural light that does not require electricity.

In an article introducing his SXSW interview a few months later, Dezeen introduced Roosegaarde as someone exploring ways of using bioluminescent bacteria found in jellyfish and mushrooms to create glow-in-the-dark trees that could replace street lights.

Our target is to perform one treatment when the plant is a seedling or a mature plant, and have it last for the lifetime of the plant, Strano said in the 2017 MIT Press release. Our work very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.

In none of these cases, however, did these individuals literally create a glowing tree. The technology simply is not there yet. Krichevskys plants were not trees, but instead modified tobacco plants, which are commonly used in genetic research. The imagery used in the TikTok video comes from either art installations made by Roosegaarde which only mimicked the technology, or from computer-generated concept art, not literal glowing trees. Sadly.

Because glowing trees do not (yet) exist, because firefly genes are not used in this area of research, and because the work is falsely attributed to Dutch scientists, the claims presented in niklongos TikTok are False.

Excerpt from:
Are Scientists 'Literally Creating Glow-in-the-Dark Trees' With Firefly DNA? - Snopes.com

Antibody Isotyping Kit: Introduction

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Global Antibody Isotyping Kit Market, by Product

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Antibody Isotyping Kit Market: Rise in awareness about diseases and improvement in the health care infrastructure is expected to drive the market -...