This graphic shows different populations of mouse brain cells, each one targeted by a tool in a new genetic toolkit. (Allen Institute Graphic)
Scientists say they’ve put together a new kind of molecular toolkit that could eventually be used to treat a variety of brain diseases, possibly including epilepsy, sleep disorders and Huntington’s disease.
The kit currently contains more than 1,000 tools of a type known as enhancer AAV vectors, with AAV standing for “adeno-associated virus.” A consortium that included researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and the University of Washington combined harmless adeno-associated viruses with snippets of engineered DNA to create a gene-therapy package that could target specific neurons in the brain while having no effect on other cells.
“Honing in on the right cells — in the right way and at the right time — is the future of precision brain medicine,” John Ngai, director of the BRAIN Initiative, said in a news release. “These tools move us closer to that future, while also expanding what we know about the brain’s cells and circuits today.”
In “Mickey 17” — a new sci-fi movie from Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean filmmaker who made his mark with “Parasite” — an expendable space traveler named Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is exposed over and over again to deadly risks. And every time he’s killed, the lab’s 3D printer just churns out another copy of Mickey.
While it’s possibly to create 3D-printed body parts for implantation, the idea of printing out a complete human body and restoring its backed-up memories is pure science fiction. Nevertheless, Christopher Mason, a Cornell University biomedical researcher who studies space-related health issues, is intrigued by the movie’s premise.
“If you could 3D print a body and perfectly reconstruct it, you could, in theory, learn a lot about a body that’s put in a more dangerous situation,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I think the concept of the movie is actually quite interesting.”
A woolly mammoth and her calf are shown trudging through frozen steppes in a promotional video from Colossal Biosciences.
It may sound cool to bring back the woolly mammoth after thousands of years of extinction — but Douglas Preston, the author of a novel that features the revival of the mammoths, has his doubts.
“If you take this and game it out to its logical end, you’re going to end up with something really terrifying,” Preston says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
That realization led him to write “Extinction,” a fictional tale that wraps the genetic resurrection of woolly mammoths and other extinct species from the Pleistocene Era into a murder mystery.
“‘Extinction’ does not have any science fiction in it,” the 67-year-old author insists. “This really is actual science that’s being done right now. It is here, and the ability to resurrect these extinct animals is here. … Maybe in my lifetime, we are going to see a de-extincted woolly mammoth, or a creature that looks a lot like a woolly mammoth.”
If the project works out as hoped, it could lead to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind cellular processes — including, for example, how tumors grow — and point to new methods for fighting disease and promoting healthy cell growth.
Over the next five years, the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will receive $35 million from the Allen Institute, and another $35 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Astronaut Peggy Whitson spends time in the International Space Station's Cupola during a 2017 tour of duty. (NASA Photo)
Astronaut Peggy Whitson already has her name in the history books, but now there’s a new entry to add: first woman named to head up a privately funded space mission.
Her new claim to fame comes courtesy of Texas-based Axiom Space, which announced today that Whitson will be the commander of the company’s second orbital mission for private astronauts. The mission known as Ax-2 would follow up on Ax-1, due to visit the International Space Station as early as January.
One of Whitson’s crewmates for Ax-2 will be mission pilot John Shoffner, who is an airplane pilot, a champion GT racer and a supporter of life science research who hails from Knoxville, Tenn.
Whitson and Shoffner will test techniques for single-cell genomics in zero-G on the space station, in collaboration with 10x Genomics.
New reference genomes were based on an analysis of 32 samples from diverse populations. (UW Graphic / David Porubsky)
Twenty years after the first human genome sequence was published, an international research team has kicked the sequencing game to the next level with a set of 64 reference genomes that reflect much higher resolution and more genetic diversity.
Since the Human Genome Project completed the first draft of its reference genome in 2001, decoding the human genetic code has been transformed from a multibillion-dollar endeavor into a relatively inexpensive commercial service. However, commercial whole-genome sequencing, or WGS, often misses out on crucial variations that can make all the difference when it comes to an individual’s health.
“As a metric, 75% of structural variants that are present in that person’s genome are missed by WGS, but are captured by our long-read phased genome assembly,” University of Washington genome scientist Evan Eichler told me in an email. “Such variants are about three times more likely to cause disease.”
Eichler, who was a member of the original Human Genome Project, is one of the senior authors of a study laying out the new set of reference genomes, published today by the journal Science.
Human cell atlases are visualized here as the day and night sides of the globe. (Cognition Studio Inc. Illustration / Dani Bergey)
Two new human cell atlases have mapped the molecular machinery that builds tissue in the weeks after conception — and could eventually point the way to addressing developmental disorders.
The researchers behind the atlases say their method for single-cell analysis, detailed in a pair of studies published by the journal Science, could dramatically accelerate efforts to trace how individual cells develop from the embryo to adulthood.
“The key point is that the method scales exponentially,” said University of Washington geneticist Jay Shendure, a senior author for both studies. “When you think about the human body, there’s 37 trillion cells. To really get the kind of comprehensive atlases that we want, we want this kind of scalability.”
Study co-author Dan Doherty, a UW pediatrics professor, compared the procedure’s promise to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope or the Human Genome Project. “Single-cell methods — it’s hard to overestimate their importance for understanding developmental biology,” he said. “They’re really giving us a picture that we’ve never seen before.”
An epidemiological “family tree” shows how different strains of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spread out across different regions of the world. The red circle highlights WA1, the first confirmed case reported in Washington state and the United States. (Nextstrain Graphic)
Detailed genetic analyses of the strains of virus that cause COVID-19 suggest that the outbreak took hold in Washington state in late January or early February, but went undetected for weeks.
That’s the upshot of two studies published by the journal Science, based on separate efforts to trace the genetic fingerprints of the coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2.
The studies draw upon analyses of more than 10,000 samples collected in the Puget Sound region as part of the Seattle Flu Study during the early weeks of the outbreak, plus thousands more samples from other areas of the world.
One of the studies was conducted by a team including Trevor Bedford, a biologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has been issuing assessments of the virus and its spread since the earliest days of the outbreak. The first version of the team’s paper went online back in March and was revised in May, months in advance of today’s peer-reviewed publication.
A pipette injects gene-editing tools into a mouse embryo.(University of Utah Health Sciences Photo)
Experts on an international commission are saying it’s too early to tweak the human genome for future generations, but they’re also pointing to the first genetic targets to be tweaked.
Those claims sparked a blizzard of questions about the ethics, legality and efficacy of the experiment. It also sparked efforts to lay down guidelines for the use of recently developed gene-editing tools such as CRISPR to make changes in the human genome that could be passed down to future generations.
In today’s report — prepared with the backing of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society — the 18-member commission says researchers will have to demonstrate that precise genomic changes can be made reliably without introducing unwanted changes. The commission also says no current technologies, including CRISPR, can satisfy that requirement.
Once the state of the art gets to that point, heritable human genome editing should initially be limited to the prevention of serious diseases that are caused by a single gene, the report says. Examples include cystic fibrosis, thalassemia, sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease.
Even in those cases, gene-editing therapy should be reserved for cases where parents who have a known risk for passing on such a disease have virtually no other options.
“Any initial uses of HHGE [heritable human genome editing] should proceed incrementally and cautiously, and provide the most favorable balance of potential benefits and harms,” Rockefeller University President Richard Lifton, the panel’s co-chair, said in a news release.
Today’s report will feed into the work of a different advisory panel at the World Health Organization, which is drawing up recommendations for governance mechanism that would apply to heritable as well as non-heritable genome editing research and clinical uses.
Those recommendations are due to be issued later this year. It’ll be up to individual countries to incorporate the guidelines as they draw up gene-editing regulations. Today’s report calls for the creation of an independent International Scientific Advisory Panel to track developments in the gene-editing field, as well as an international body to provide further guidance on regulating the field.
Francis Collins, the longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, gave the report his thumbs-up in a tweet:
Kudos to @theNASEM for thoughtful recommendations on clinical use of heritable #genomeediting technologies – glad to see a call by experts for profound caution in germline use of #CRISPR in this #NIH sponsored report: https://t.co/aX7eEngtow
A phylogenetic tree tracks the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as it spread throughout the United States. An orange dot at lower left indicates WA-1, the first confirmed case in the U.S., which was detected in Washington state. (Nextstrain / GISAID Graphic)
From the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, genetic sleuths have been at the forefront in the global effort to monitor SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. By comparing the molecular fingerprints of different virus samples collected in Washington state, they were able to track down the first signs of community spread in the U.S.
