NOS Themes:
Curiosity - If we further research this, we may be able to fix genetic disorders
Repeatability - you can get CRISPR and observe it's effects on other DNA strands
Saturday, May 31, 2014
DNA Editing
A team of scientists has recently come to a deeper understanding in how enzymes edit genes. By further studying enzymes like these, this may make us be able to correct genetic diseases. A type of CRISPR enzyme has been found to be able to edit the human genome. Enzymes like this have been able to correct errors in a 23 billion base pair fragment of DNA. When the enzyme finds an error, it literally pulls the DNA strand appart and inserts an RNA fragment as replacement for it. Scientists have been monitoring these "R-loops" and they are observing how CRISPR makes them. This allowed the scientists to see more steps of the process of correcting DNA so that they can later have the ability to do it themselves.
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I wonder how this will impact some things we have been studying in class. Gene therapy. Curing disease through changing genes. It could really open a whole world of cures and treatments.
ReplyDeleteThis topic is very interesting to me. I wonder how much this will help people treat genetic diseases. It seems like it could have a huge effect on these kinds of diseases. I think that we could examine the CRISPR and learn how to manipulate DNA like it does. This way we could treat specific parts of DNA and treat specific diseases.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting article! This could one day be the end almost all diseases. I hope to live in a would where children don't have to suffer through terrible diseases and sicknesses. I want to one day live in a world were all children are able to grow up and have a chance at life. I also wonder if this could be used to make a Super Baby! I want a Super Baby one day.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. My question though is what are R-loops?
ReplyDelete