
New technique enables safer gene-editing therapy using CRISPR - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-technique-enables-safer-gene-editing-therapy.html
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shamas
To me, it really feels like the people working on this are amongst the
immensely tiny fraction of people doing something useful. I'm envious and I
hope I can one day find a way to help fund those that are better than me.

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fgimenez
I fund people like this a lot. They're always hiring developers for the
bioinformatics parts of their products

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agumonkey
I'd love to see their requirements for a bioinfo dev.

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pcunite
How far are we away from making tiny robots that can float along in the blood
stream and wirelessly beam back DNA and virus patterns they've identified?

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jfarlow
Tiny robots already exist - they're called proteins (of which Cas9 is one).
We're just now starting to be able to program these proteins de novo.

Reading DNA - well, DNA is inside a nucleus inside a cell. That's tricky to
get that information out. But if you're just trying to trigger a signal iff a
case exists (i.e. viral infection), well, that too already exists - it's
you're immune system.

Problem with wireless beaming is power. The amount of power required to
transmit a (radio) signal through centimeters of human tissue is just not a
biologically reasonable amount.

If you want to use light, well, that's getting interesting - there are a lot
of ways that biology can create and read light (see bioluminescence and
plants, respectively). There is currently a lot of research and a number of
companies that are building biological sensors that you can 'wear' that can
peer into your bloodstream that get access to some information. But the
bandwidth is not such that you could transmit much more than a single gradient
of signal, much less a few gigabytes of genetic information.

But the research presented here is how to do high-throughput analysis in an
academic manner very much outside of a live organism, and in a consumable
laboratory setting. This is a useful technique using relatively accessible
materials to analytically check that a study's gene therapies are not too far
off their targets.

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gozur88
>If you want to use light, well, that's getting interesting - there are a lot
of ways that biology can create and read light (see bioluminescence and
plants, respectively).

Periodically someone alters an animal such that it glows under UV light. Seems
like it ought to be possible to equip people with a "check engine light" if,
say, their blood glucose or Troponin T levels are too high.

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jfarlow
Yep - that's on it's way ;-)

At this point, having such a 'check engine light', or, for instance, having a
cluster of 10 cells under your wrist that change color (which is subsequently
sensed by your iWatch) is _just_ a (very challenging and expensive)
engineering problem. It's entirely scientifically reasonable to have such
biological readouts sensing a number of different biological states. You
already blush, perspire, increase heart-rate, etc. - hooking up those same
responses to change the pigment in 10 particular cells on your wrist is not
much of a stretch of our current tech. It's only logistical sci-fi, not
theoretical sci-fi.

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gri3v3r
The analogies that the article uses are very accurate. When I read about the
side-effects of CRISPR I was surprised that those involved did not take
measurements against this issue. Controlling which area will be edited is the
key here. Also the smaller the genome area is, the more difficult it is to
target it. Imagine that you need to correct the article "an" to "a" in a big
text. Maybe targeting neighbouring areas without changing them is needed in
order to increase the size of affected sequence. So you need to change "is an
ge" to "is a ge" in "CRISPR is a gene editing technique" sentence.

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Obi_Juan_Kenobi
What did you read? Off-target changes are a major topic in gene editing
approaches, and are universally reported. It is among the chief advantages for
CRISPR. There are hundreds of papers that discuss this, and dozens where it is
the focus of the article.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=crispr+specificity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=crispr+specificity)

The specificity has been perfectly acceptable for many research purposes for
several years now. The current issue is increasing this even more to be
suitable for clinical applications. There are many strategies being
considered.

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justifier
great resource using 3d animation to explain rna and dna knowledge:
[https://www.dnalc.org/resources/3d/](https://www.dnalc.org/resources/3d/)

