Bodies are fragile and prone to the eventual failure known as death. But the DNA that encodes all the instructions for creating and operating those perishable bodies? That stuff sticks around. Thanks to 7000-year-old DNA from a tooth found in a Spanish cave, for example, we know that the “caveman” who died there had blue eyes and was probably lactose intolerant.
Nonie Hickle’s hair is coal-dark. Her husband, Vincent, marvels at it. He points to it and says, “No gray!” Nonie’s a little amazed too; she thinks it’s kind of spooky. After all, she’s 91 years old.
Statistically speaking, Hickle, who lives in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood, should be sick. She ought to have cardiovascular disease, cancer, or heart failure. Yet she doesn’t have any of those things. True, her hearing has been going bad over the past several years. And she has a touch, just a touch, of high blood pressure. But if you were to look at this 4'11" Korean-American nonagenarian, you wouldn’t peg her at a day over 70.
Nearly six years after developing the first self-replicating life form with a chemically created genome, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla have cut that bacterium's genome nearly in half. The result is a creature with a smaller genome than has ever been found in nature.
For more than 20 years, J. Craig Venter has been trying to make a cell with the fewest possible genes in the hope that the stripped-down cell would tell us something about the necessities of life.
In a paper published today in Science, Venter and his team announced that they’ve made a big step toward that goal—and found some surprises along the way.
The parts list of basic life is one-third longer than scientists had thought, said Venter, who is known for winning the race to map the human genome. And it depends much more on context than they had realized.
Getting their synthetic cell to replicate and grow fast enough to use in the lab took 473 genes, 149 of which have an unclear function.
A Cambridge, Massachusetts, company, Veritas Genetics, said this week that is how much it will charge for a consumer-friendly know-your-genome service that would pair insight into your genetic makeup with a handy phone app and on-demand video calls with genetic counselors.
Humans have been having humans for hundreds of thousands of years as part of our genetic drive so it seems counter-Darwinian that some genes might work against our ability to make a baby. But that is exactly what certain genes might be doing, according to women’s health startup Celmatix, and they are now working with 23andMe to hopefully figure out why.
La tecnología es rabiosamente nueva, pero la historia se ha repetido un par de veces o tres, con las células madre, la clonación y otras investigaciones que requieren embriones humanos. Los científicos occidentales descubren un procedimiento poderoso, vocean a sus ministerios de sanidad la necesidad de autorizarlo o regularlo, y nadie autoriza ni regula nada hasta que las potencias asiáticas se ponen a hacerlo con más pericias que escrúpulos, con más prisa que normativa. Como decía este lunes un científico británico, “China tiene directrices, pero no suele estar claro cuáles son”.
Braving a funding ban put in place by America’s top health agency, some U.S. research centers are moving ahead with attempts to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep with the goal of creating hearts, livers, or other organs needed for transplants.
The effort to incubate organs in farm animals is ethically charged because it involves adding human cells to animal embryos in ways that could blur the line between species.
Last September, in a reversal of earlier policy, the National Institutes of Health announced it would not support studies involving such “human-animal chimeras” until it had reviewed the scientific and social implications more closely.
Keith Joung, a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues say they have come up with a way to make the gene editing system known as CRISPR-Cas9 far more precise when it enters cells to snip DNA.
But as Joung, who is also a founder of Cambridge, MA-based gene editing company Editas Medicine, was quick to note, there’s much more work to do to prove the technique makes CRISPR-Cas9 precise enough—and safe enough—to speed up the already competitive race to test CRISPR-based therapeutics in humans.
23andMe has raised a substantial $115 million in a series E round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, with participation from new investors Casdin Capital, WuXi Healthcare Ventures, and Xfund, as well as existing investors such as Google Ventures.
The personal genomics and biotechnology company was founded in 2006 by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company had already raised $126 million prior to today’s announcement, and boasts a slew of big-name investors, including Google, Google Ventures, Sergey Brin, and Yuri Milner.
