The faces of murderers or rapists could be ‘recreated’ from DNA left at the scene of the crime, according to new research.
Scientists have identified the genes that shape the extraordinary variation in the human face.
Many features, such as nose size and face width, stem from specific mutations, say researchers.
Good; glad they are hearing us. Because it is a huge issue for sure especially with some of the things that I seen some of the researchers proposing to use CRISPR, 3D Printers, etc. to create some bizarre creatures. Example, in March to scientists in the UK wanted to use CRISPR to create a dragon; personally I didn’t expect it to be successful. However, the scientists didn’t consider the fallout to the public if they had actually succeeded.
For a few hundred dollars, anyone can start doing genetic editing in the comfort of their own home.
Summary: Researchers have optimized optogenetics to map the neural circuits of the rodent brain with single neuron resolution.
Source: Max Planck Florida.
Researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience are optimizing optogenetic methods for circuit mapping, enabling measurements of functional synaptic connectivity with single neuron resolution.
Alterar a natureza da natureza.
Inovadores estão trabalhando em direção a um mundo no qual a matéria viva é totalmente programável por meio da biologia sintética onde as pessoas já não são apenas consumidores de tecnologia, mas os cidadãos de um mundo tecnológico.
Isto é o que eu explorei no episódio 3 das explorações, como a biologia sintética está mudando a natureza da Natureza.
Você é a biologia, eu sou a biologia, a Terra é a biologia — e tudo isso é cada vez mais programável. Com o poder de projetar e crescer o nosso futuro, que tipo de mundo que você vai ajudar a construir?
#TheWorldWeBuild
Por Bryan Johnson.
A team of Harvard Medical School scientists, which includes genetics professor George Church, have designed a bacterial genome that has been rewritten on a massive scale, with changes in more than 62,000 spots.
They haven’t used it to make living E. coli yet, but the findings, reported today in Science, mark progress towards genetically engineered bacteria that could make new materials without risk of exchanging genes with organisms in the wild.
“It‘s an important step forward for demonstrating the malleability of the genetic code and how entirely new types of biological functions and properties can be extracted from organisms through genomes that have been recoded,” Farren Isaacs of Yale University, who has worked with the team in the past, told Nature.
The article overplays the alarmist tone a bit, but this is still an idiotic experiment.
If I understand correctly (the reporter didn’t explain it properly), he mutated the virus multiple times, until it no longer matches existing antibodies (i.e. somebody exposed would still become resistant — if they survived — and it is still possible to create new antiviral drugs that can target it); i.e. it is dangerous, but not invincible.
Given how long it takes to make new vaccinations for flue strains (and the cost of distributing them globally), this is still deeply irresponsible.
A controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively making the human population defenceless against its reemergence.
Most of the world today has developed some level of immunity to the 2009 pandemic flu virus, which means that it can now be treated as less dangerous “seasonal flu”. However, The Independent understands that Professor Kawaoka intentionally set out to see if it was possible to convert it to a pre-pandemic state in order to analyse the genetic changes involved.
Researchers including George Church have made further progress on the path to fully rewriting the genome of living bacteria. Such a recoded organism, once available, could feature functionality not seen in nature. It could also make the bacteria cultivated in pharmaceutical and other industries immune to viruses, saving billions of dollars of losses due to viral contamination. Finally, the altered genetic information in such an organism wouldn’t be able to contaminate natural cells because of the code’s limitations outside the lab, researchers say, so its creation could stop laboratory engineered organisms from genetically contaminating wildlife. In the DNA of living organisms, the same amino acid can be encoded by multiple codons — DNA “words” of three nucleotide letters. Here, building on previous work that demonstrated it was possible to use the genetic equivalent of “search and replace” in Escherichia coli to substitute a single codon with an alternative, Nili Ostrov, Church and colleagues explored the feasibility of replacing multiple codons, genome-wide. The researchers attempted to reduce the number of codons in the E. coli code from 64 to 57 by exploring how to eradicate more than 60,000 instances of seven different codons. They systematically replaced all 62,214 instances of these seven codons with alternatives. In the recoded E.coli segments that the researchers assembled and tested, 63% of all instances of the seven codons were replaced, the researchers say, and most of the genes impacted by underlying amino acid changes were expressed normally. Though they did not achieve a fully operational 57-codon E. coli, “a functionally altered genome of this scale has not yet been explored,” the authors write. Their results provide critical insights into the next step in the genome rewriting arena — creating a fully recoded organism.
