First step to ‘designer life’: Biologists breed bacteria with lab-made DNA, adding two extra, artificial letters Biohackers will find this article to be of special interest. This is kind of a big deal.
Scientists led by the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have added two extra, artificial letters to the ancient alphabet of A, C, G and T. And the E. coli living with this unusual six-letter, three-base-pair alphabet are, by the account published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, capable of surviving tough laboratory conditions.
The biologists added two new letters to the four-letter DNA alphabet within E. coli bacteria. The scientists called the novel base units dNaM and d5SICS (a newer, improved version of the bases were named dNaM and dTPT3). You can think of these unnatural nucleobases as X and Y. Years own the line, microbes with increased genetic information could present exciting and lucrative scientific possibilities: bacteria capable of churning out therapeutic human proteins, or altered bugs that hoover up environmental spills.
83 rare genetic mutations found to affect a person’s height Scientists are slowly figuring out what does what in the human genome.
The research team analyzed the DNA of more than 700,000 individuals across multiple countries. They checked for more than 200,000 known coding variants, and cross-checked the results with the person’s height. This allowed them to narrow down the 83 genetic variants that seemed to be influencing height in some way.
We Could Back Up The Entire Internet On A Gram Of DNA This is pretty amazing. All sorts of interesting nuggets of knowledge in this quick and engaging video.
How new technology helps crack cold cases Interesting application of DNA evidence, but it makes perfectly good sense to use it this way. Conclusive proof of anything? Not so much, but it's at least an additional clue.
About FDA’s Biomarker Qualification Program Some complain that the FDA slows down the research process. Others acknowledge that the FDA promotes standardization and keeps companies honest, thereby protecting the public in a number of ways.
Your Amazing Molecular Machines Concluding remarks highlight how nanobot technology might develop into a new form of medical intervention in the future (probably something like forty or so years from now).