Realitivity is back and better than ever with our first tri-part series! This time, we’re taking a deep dive on CRISPR - the genetic technology that borrows the genius of bacteria to give humans unprecedented power over DNA. In this first segment, we’re brushing up on Cellular Biology, which gives us all the keys to understand just how revolutionary CRISPR really is. In the next part, we’ll explore the many visionaries who came together to discover CRISPR - including how the technology they developed actually works. Finally, we’ll explore the wild world of CRISPR applications, including the thorny ethical dilemmas that surround its potential to democratize genetic editing. Thanks for sticking around & stay tuned to see if Mitch & Petra succeed in applying CRISPR to give themselves phosphorescent fingernails!
SHOW NOTES:
Realitivity is back and better than ever with our first tri-part series! This time, we’re taking a deep dive on CRISPR - the genetic technology that borrows the genius of bacteria to give humans unprecedented power over DNA. In this first segment, we’re brushing up on Cellular Biology, which gives us all the keys to understand just how revolutionary CRISPR really is. In the next part, we’ll explore the many visionaries who came together to discover CRISPR - including how the technology they developed actually works. Finally, we’ll explore the wild world of CRISPR applications, including the thorny ethical dilemmas that surround its potential to democratize genetic editing. Thanks for sticking around & stay tuned to see if Mitch & Petra succeed in applying CRISPR to give themselves phosphorescent fingernails!
Gregor Mendel
Read more about the unbelievable story of Austrian monk and pioneering geneticist, Gregor Mendel, whose fastidious experiments with pea plants led him to create the Principles of Inheritance - which were almost never found!
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gregor-Mendel
We all know the story of Watson & Crick discovering the structure of DNA. But did you know that chemist and x-ray crystallography expert Rosalind Franklin provided the key image to decipher the double helix structure? That is only the best-known part of her story: her earliest work helped protect personnel during WWII, and she made a series of significant advancements across biology, chemistry, and virology - all before she died at the age of 37. Dive into her story here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02144-4
So, Mitch & Petra were both right. The Human Genome Project itself lasted 13 years, from 1990-2003, and the draft sequence was unveiled 20 years ago - but, the final version that filled in all the gaps and corrected the original errors was only released this week! The discoveries continue to emerge thanks to this massive effort to sequence the human genome.
Here’s the latest update:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/science/human-genome-complete.html
Here’s a link to the government archive of the Human Genome Project: https://web.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/index.shtml
And here’s a recent analysis showing just how much research has been built on it since then: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00314-6
Don’t try this at home - there are 20 amino acids, of which 9 are essential to human survival, and your humble white potato contains all of them! But as we said, if you tried to go solo potato you’d be missing out on all kinds of other good vitamins, minerals and nutrients - which we’ll cover another day! For now, here’s a source, and remember, variety is the spice of life:
https://www.popsci.com/nutrition-single-food-survival/
Here’s a great resource to learn more about how DNA and mRNA collaborate to make Protein - those fabulously complex molecules that play many important roles in your body.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/translation-dna-to-mrna-to-protein-393/
If you like Tetris you’ll probably agree that protein folding is fascinating! Here’s the latest update on AlphaFold, the game changing neural network developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind in order to autonomously predict the structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence. After many years in R&D, DeepMind is releasing the power of protein folding to the masses - with potentially revolutionary results:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/deepminds-alphafold-2-reveal-what-we-learned-and-didnt-learn/
By the way, the masses aren’t bad at folding themselves! Do you remember the story of Foldit, the gaming community that solves high-stakes protein folding challenges?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/foldit-gamers-solve-riddle/
Thanks for following along and keeping it REAL - and as always, please let us know what you’d like to hear / see / read more of!