"It will change everything" - two scientific blockbusters we'll all benefit from

[bennevisplace]

Mainly of interest to geeks, but of import to everyone.

Blockbuster # 1: CRISPR-Cas9

Within weeks we expect to have several effective vaccines against the coronavirus, vaccines made from scratch and rushed to market within 12 months. Hitherto, such a development schedule for a new vaccine was unthinkable. Exactly six months ago Scientific American (from which the above infographic is taken) published a hopeful review of the main approaches being taken scientificamerican.com/arti... As it has turned out, SA's tentative "could" has become a resounding "should", if not "will, or I'll eat my hat".

The breakneck speed with which these vaccine projects have advanced has depended on the ease with which genetic information can be precisely cut from one organism, pasted into another, and modified at will, courtesy of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9. This is a long acronym for a particular system deployed by bacteria to neutralise invading viruses, a system eventually put to work in human and animal cells. For their role in harnessing this essentially bacterial technology Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry.

Unless you're already familiar with the subject, I recommend looking at a few animations e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=2pp17E4...(Not working as expected?) and explanations e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=sweN8d4...(Not working as expected?)

The new RNA vaccines against Covid are one example among many, and it's a safe bet that gene editing based on CRISPR-Cas9 will pervade many areas of medical research long into the future.

Blockbuster # 2: DeepMind's AlphaFold

"An artificial intelligence network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence". Thus begins an article in Nature published yesterday nature.com/articles/d41586-...

Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body. They do most of the work in cells and are required for the structure, function, and regulation of the body’s tissues and organs. Proteins, along with genes (the segments of DNA which control the manufacture and activity of proteins), are the building blocks of life. They include enzymes, antibodies, hormones and various kinds of body tissue. While the long chains of amino acids that make proteins are easy to sequence, it's much more difficult to elucidate proteins structure, often a complex tangle of folds, twists and offshoots. While there are only 21 amino acids, there are more than 20,000 proteins encoded by genes and several million variations (proteoforms), each with its own peculiar 3-dimensional shape.

Hitherto, determining the structure of proteins has been painstaking and expensive. In the past 25 years much effort has gone into accurately predicting protein structures from their amino-acid sequence. Success would be a great boost to life sciences and medicine, turbo-charging the quest to elucidate cell biology and advance drug discovery. In this year's international competition between artificial intelligence (AI) networks aiming to predict protein structures, DeepMind's AlphaFold won hands down, and with such accuracy that it has been hailed as a revolution in biology.

deepmind.com/blog/article/a...

[studebaker]

Amazing, I bookmarked this. Thank you for posting.Dana

[DelrayDave]

I knew about CRISPR. We can be sure the advances are just starting and more are coming. One issue will be cost and access.

[bennevisplace in reply to DelrayDave]

Yes, the applications of genome editing are more than we can imagine, and CRISPR technology is being improved all the time. The breakthrough was a big step up in accuracy and simplicity, so a lot more researchers could afford to use it. I guess that would have been 7 or 8 years ago?

I don't know that much about genomics and gene editing, but it seems to me that the main fields affected would be fundamental biology, medicine, agriculture and environment. Here is another viewpoint labiotech.eu/crispr/crispr-...

[DelrayDave in reply to bennevisplace]

Thanks for that. It's interesting that all the possibilities mentioned are, or at least should be, advantageous to humans, though I am not as sure faster horses will be only faster and not harmed in some unforeseen way.

The problem, at least one of them, is when we start fooling around with human genetics directly, especially human gamete genetics, where the changes are passed on. For now all the films about genetically produced geniuses or super soldiers are fiction. Perhaps it will stay that way. But will we have the wisdom to know where to stop?

Anyone today who claims inherent genetic advanced intelligence for a particular race or group is not only a racist but is factually wrong. What if that changes? What if a rich family of, say, Fijians, makes themselves smarter and stronger and impervious to disease so that their life expectancy is 250 years? Would that mean they really do have the right to regulate the rest if us relative sick dummies? Still, obviously, fiction. But incremental advances are likely to be limited to the wealthy, and slowly such changes could bring social unrest we are simply not ready to handle.

For now we can be grateful for the vaccines and other breakthroughs that restore us to health.

David

[gardening-girl in reply to bennevisplace]

Actually bennevisplace, the mRNA vaccines do not use CRISPR-Cas9 technology. From the day the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was digitally released by the Chinese government, that sequence was used to synthesize the spike mRNA in a testtube, at least at Moderna. No need for having an intact viral genome; no need for CRISPR-Cas9 cutting, pasting, cloning and culturing.

[bennevisplace in reply to gardening-girl]

Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding! It's something I had read in connection with vaccine development.

[bennevisplace]

BBC will be covering Deepmind AlphaFold shortly, at 1630 hours GMT, Radio 4, Inside Science