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.
Artist Kate Thompson worked samples of synthetic DNA into the ink and acrylic coating for her portrait of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. (University of Washington Photo / Dennis Wise)
On one level, multimedia artist Kate Thompson’s work shows the black-and-white visage of Franklin — the late biochemist whose famous “Photo 51” revealed the double-helix structure of life’s most vital molecule, even though she didn’t get her full share of credit for it.
Look more closely, and you’ll see a mosaic of 2,000 images submitted by the general public as part of UW’s #MemoriesInDNA project.
And if you were to scrape off a few flakes of paint and process them in a DNA lab, you could read out the pixels that make up all of those images and more, translated from the four-letter genetic code of life to the ones and zeroes of digital data.
“This portrait is not only preserving Franklin’s memory, but preserving the data as well, in a form that will be accessible to future generations,” Karin Strauss, co-director of UW’s Molecular Information Systems Laboratory and principal research manager at Microsoft Research, said today in a news release about the art project.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates makes a point during a Q&A with Margaret Hamburg, board chair for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been working to improve the state of global health through his nonprofit foundation for 20 years, and today he told the nation’s premier scientific gathering that advances in artificial intelligence and gene editing could accelerate those improvements exponentially in the years ahead.
“We have an opportunity with the advance of tools like artificial intelligence and gene-based editing technologies to build this new generation of health solutions so that they are available to everyone on the planet. And I’m very excited about this,” Gates said in Seattle during a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Such tools promise to have a dramatic impact on several of the biggest challenges on the agenda for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created by the tech guru and his wife in 2000.
It’s been 80 million years since our our evolutionary branch diverged from mice — so why do we share some fragments of DNA that are essentially unchanged? (Fred Hutch News Service Illustration / Kim Carney)
Why do some strings of genetic code remain virtually unchanged despite tens of millions of years of evolutionary divergence? A newly published study that takes advantage of the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR has found that at least some of those DNA strings are essential to keep healthy cells growing and block the growth of tumor cells.
The research, published today in Nature Genetics, is the “first study finding large-scale importance of these highly conserved elements,” senior author Rob Bradley of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center said in a news release.
Bradley and his colleagues say unraveling the mysteries of those ultra-conserved elements could lead to new avenues for cancer treatment.
Chinese researcher He Jiankui discusses his lab’s effort to produce babies whose genes have been altered to protect them from future HIV infection. (The He Lab via YouTube)
Chinese researcher He Jiankui, who stirred up a global controversy last year when he said his experiment produced twin baby girls with gene-edited traits, has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $430,000 fine, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
