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Category: genetics – Page 515

Scientists Kick Off Synthetic Biology Project to Make Virus-Resistant Super Cells

Recently, roughly 200 eminent scientists assembled in Boston. Their agenda? Creating “superhero” human cells impervious to all viral attacks and possibly other killers—radiation, freezing, aging, or even cancer.

The trick isn’t super-soldier serum. Instead, the team is relying on tools from synthetic biology to read the cell’s genetic blueprint and rewrite large chunks of the genome to unlock these superpowers.

“There is very strong reason to believe that we can produce cells that would be completely resistant to all known viruses,” said Dr. Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University and a co-leader of the project. “It should also be possible to engineer other traits, including resistance to prions and cancer.”

Key part of human gene activation revealed by new study

May 15 (UPI) — Until now, scientists weren’t sure how gene activation mechanisms avoided nucleosomes, the bodyguards tasked with keeping DNA turned off.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, however, have pinpointed a key factor responsible for unraveling nucleosome structures and allowing genes to be activated.

Geneticists described the newly identified nucleosome destabilizing factor, or NDF, this week in the journal Genes and Development.

Data storage on DNA: Where Silicon Valley meets biotech

In the heart of San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, which not long ago was dirt lots and warehouses, Emily Leproust is cooking up what she — and $209 million worth of investor cash — believes is the future of DNA production.

Leproust is CEO of Twist Bioscience, a 5-year-old biotech company striving to make the production of synthetic DNA — which is used in fragrances, genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs — cheaper, faster and smaller.

The same lab-manufactured DNA, Leproust hopes, could also transform the way data, from music to medical records, is stored.

Baldness cure could come from side-effect of cancer drug

A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

Around four in 10 men suffer male pattern baldness by the age of 45 and two thirds by the age of 60.

At the moment only two drugs, minoxidil and finasteride, are available for the treatment of male pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) — the classic type of receding hair loss in men.

UCSD Scientists Using Genome Editing Technology to Cure Genetic Diseases

Crispr could eliminate Genetic disease.

It’s so small it can’t be seen with the naked eye, but research is showing that CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is bringing sight to the blind.

UC San Diego researchers are using CRISPR, a technology that allows scientists to edit genomes, to cure disease.

For the last two years, Ophthalmologist Dr. Kang Zhang and UC San Diego researchers have been working with CRISPR, injecting CRISPR into the eyes of mice to cure retinitis pigmentosa – a genetic form of blindness. “What we’ve seen in mice is that we can bring back actually 30 percent of vision sometimes even 50 percent of vision,” Dr. Zhang told NBC 7.

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