CHROMOSOMES, FRANKINFOODS AND DESIGNER HUMANS

Have I used this before?

Who is this little girl?

As of five minutes ago my “hit counter” (furnished by blogger) had recorded 12,117 hits for the entire life of this blog.  I would like to believe that each “hit” corresponded to an actual human, reading a blog entry, but I’m not quite that naïve.  For instance: after about a week of getting six to ten hits per day, today I have had 80 so far – and 73 of them are from Poland!  Is there a dedicated, scholarly group of Poles sitting around eagerly assimilating my little essays?  No, there isn’t.  Just today I came face-to-face with “Vampirestat”.  Vampirestat is a “bot”; it crawls through the internet surveying what’s out there, presumably looking for something its master can use to make money.  Vampirestat is not the only bot doing this; I also have been crawled over by bots called things like “semalt”,” bloopish”, and even “thetaoofbadass”.  The flesh creeps to think of such things.  How many of my hits represent real people?  I doubt if I will ever know.

Maybe vampirestat is headquartered in Poland, although Romania seems like a better fit.

Well, you army of bots, there is a good article in a recent issue of the Economist.  It relates the efforts – successful to a point – of scientists to produce a totally artificial chromosome.  They are working with the yeast molecule.  Yeast, as most of you know, is a eukaryote – it arranges its genetic material on chromosomes, and stores it in the nucleus.   Yeast has been important to humans for thousands of years – think bread and beer – and lately as a “model  organism” for medical science to experiment upon.  The researchers in this study (conducted at Johns Hopkins) aim eventually to produce a completely synthetic yeast molecule.  Apparently this work has become feasible because of the falling price of DNA synthesis – and the availability of an army of unpaid undergraduates to do the grunt work, the nature of which was not explained. 

The designing of this model was done in silico, meaning on a computer.  It (the molecule) was based on the structure of a real (natural) yeast chromosome.  The Hopkins people left out things they deemed redundant or downright malicious: “transposons” , some genes for transfer RNA, and certain stop codons.  They also tinkererd with the structure of the chromosome in other, more complicated ways, trying to explain the nature of which would take all afternoon.  Having created this synthetic molecule they inserted into a yeast cell and, low and behold, it worked.  They now are forging ahead, to create an entirely synthetic yeast cell.

This work has important implications all up and down the line.  For cancer, perhaps it would be possible to delete genes or even longer segments of DNA if they are found to be mutated and potentially carcinogenic.  Nobody would argue against that.  However, there are other profound implications.  Those of you who recoil from  GMOs and campaign against  “Frankinfoods” will shudder at the last paragraph.

Now let’s see if I can give you the link.
  

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21599754-first-synthetic-chromosome-creature-complex-cells-designed

P.S.  The title of this article is “DIY chromosomes”, but nowhere that I can see is DIY defined.  If you figure it out, please let me know.