5 ms·

Using a bacteria-derived antiviral mechanism against our own viruses sounds obvious to anyone who hears about CRISPR's origins for the first time, I'd hasard.

Using a bacteria-derived antiviral mechanism against our own viruses sounds obvious to anyone who hears about CRISPR's origins for the first time, I'd hasard. A less-explored idea is the one I first got from the title: would oversuse of CRISPR lead to "superbugs" issues like we had with antibiotics? This sounds like something interesting to work on, even before starting their large-scale use. I guess a lot could go wrong if viruses started to become resistant to bacteria's immune system mechanisms.

emiliobumachar 7y ago
Why are they not already resistant? The bacteria are out there.
- robbiep 7y ago
  Because viruses mutate quickly and are highly specific to a type of bacteria or other cell/species
  - anonymfus 7y ago
    Quick mutations are their way to resist CRISPR and other defences.
LinuxBender 7y ago
One potential risk I see would be that Crispr becomes too easy for anyone to do, and someone starts selling dodgy kits that allow for simple mistakes to turn into complex problems. An extreme outcome might be like the fictional movie "I Am Legend", which was a horrible title for the movie. Someone gets desperate to cure a late stage cancer in a loved one and ends up creating a pathogen that can manage to spread to other people and wipe out a portion or all of the population. Or perhaps someone starts selling kits that "make your muscles bigger", but in 0.7% of the population, that kit also makes the persons heart become oversized. Is it safe to assume that these scenarios are too difficult to accomplish? I am asking because people will do what people can do and we will see online crispr kits before long.
- jobseeker990 7y ago
  You mean like this? http://www.lasikathome.com/ http://www.lasikathome.com/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hndamien 7y ago
    I'm lost for words.
    - knodi123 7y ago
      haha, it's satire, but it's brilliant
  - dredwerker 7y ago
    That's funny but no, like this: https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ not satire :)
pgt 7y ago
I've been thinking about the nature of security in biology. How do you keep enemies out when you are guarding something valuable like an oasis or your heart/brain? Well, we can install layers of access control like cell membranes which apply access control. We can cordon off the nuclear power plants (like mitochondria) with a "dumb" API that produces energy in return for nutrients and avoids "smart contracts". In the medieval sense, we can dig a moat and install a drawbridge. Bridges adds latency, but at least you can retract them during wartime. But the enemy is pretty clever, so they carry long ladders across the desert that can span the moat. So you add a winding cave before the moat so the ladders don't fit. But then they wisen up and pay spies behind your lines to lower the bridge, which is analogous to hijacking your immune system, or they invent a folding ladder, and so on. But none of this helps you if your enemy can consume you at a macro scale by swallowing you whole. So complex species tend to grow larger or add multiple layers of specialised topology (organs) with disposable individuals - not to mention growing their societies. I suspect there exists a "Shannon Information Theory of Survival" that can guarantee a defensible strategy as long as you can inject sufficient variance into the environment (high pressure, low pressure, vacuum, hot, cold, acidic, etc.) so that it would be more costly for an attacker to usurp you than to forge an alliance.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  It warrants to be careful with analogies though, because no matter how clever or graphic or seemingly appropriate they might seem, the point of analogies is simply to make our human mind understand complex processes better - they don't necessarily provide any new information about those processes or what would work to affect those processes and what would not. Empirical evidence is what is interesting and applicable in practice. Analogies can be used after that evidence is already collected, to put in a biology book to make students sweat less. But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    > But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do. Is it? It seems like analogies can often point into the right direction to look at. Of course analogies are not sufficient and you do need to do the actual empirical work, but it also seems a bit unwise to discard their ability to detect similarities. The only reason you can make a good analogy is because there is an underlying shared abstraction .
ggggtez 7y ago
The "superbug" would probably need to take the form of essentially "encrypting" the genes to make them impossible to recognize, but somehow still having a way to decode them. Could happen, but might also be evolutionarily difficult.
- yetihehe 7y ago
  That would be probably the best that can happen, because then you just target that one mechanism which just one superbug has. When it cannot decrypt properly, it dies. It also would be almost impossible, it's like one mutation that changes whole genome at once.
COGlory 7y ago
The smart thing to do (and this has already been done in vitro) is to use phages to deliver spacers guided to antibiotic resistance genes. That way, the cells delete their own antibiotic resistance genes, and the phages propagate the changes throughout the bacterial population. Bonus points if you use a budding phage.

emiliobumachar 7y ago

Why are they not already resistant? The bacteria are out there.

robbiep 7y ago
Because viruses mutate quickly and are highly specific to a type of bacteria or other cell/species
- anonymfus 7y ago
  Quick mutations are their way to resist CRISPR and other defences.

LinuxBender 7y ago

One potential risk I see would be that Crispr becomes too easy for anyone to do, and someone starts selling dodgy kits that allow for simple mistakes to turn into complex problems. An extreme outcome might be like the fictional movie "I Am Legend", which was a horrible title for the movie. Someone gets desperate to cure a late stage cancer in a loved one and ends up creating a pathogen that can manage to spread to other people and wipe out a portion or all of the population. Or perhaps someone starts selling kits that "make your muscles bigger", but in 0.7% of the population, that kit also makes the persons heart become oversized. Is it safe to assume that these scenarios are too difficult to accomplish? I am asking because people will do what people can do and we will see online crispr kits before long.

jobseeker990 7y ago
You mean like this? http://www.lasikathome.com/ http://www.lasikathome.com/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hndamien 7y ago
  I'm lost for words.
  - knodi123 7y ago
    haha, it's satire, but it's brilliant
- dredwerker 7y ago
  That's funny but no, like this: https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ not satire :)

pgt 7y ago

I've been thinking about the nature of security in biology. How do you keep enemies out when you are guarding something valuable like an oasis or your heart/brain? Well, we can install layers of access control like cell membranes which apply access control. We can cordon off the nuclear power plants (like mitochondria) with a "dumb" API that produces energy in return for nutrients and avoids "smart contracts". In the medieval sense, we can dig a moat and install a drawbridge. Bridges adds latency, but at least you can retract them during wartime. But the enemy is pretty clever, so they carry long ladders across the desert that can span the moat. So you add a winding cave before the moat so the ladders don't fit. But then they wisen up and pay spies behind your lines to lower the bridge, which is analogous to hijacking your immune system, or they invent a folding ladder, and so on. But none of this helps you if your enemy can consume you at a macro scale by swallowing you whole. So complex species tend to grow larger or add multiple layers of specialised topology (organs) with disposable individuals - not to mention growing their societies. I suspect there exists a "Shannon Information Theory of Survival" that can guarantee a defensible strategy as long as you can inject sufficient variance into the environment (high pressure, low pressure, vacuum, hot, cold, acidic, etc.) so that it would be more costly for an attacker to usurp you than to forge an alliance.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
It warrants to be careful with analogies though, because no matter how clever or graphic or seemingly appropriate they might seem, the point of analogies is simply to make our human mind understand complex processes better - they don't necessarily provide any new information about those processes or what would work to affect those processes and what would not. Empirical evidence is what is interesting and applicable in practice. Analogies can be used after that evidence is already collected, to put in a biology book to make students sweat less. But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do.
- feanaro 7y ago
  > But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do. Is it? It seems like analogies can often point into the right direction to look at. Of course analogies are not sufficient and you do need to do the actual empirical work, but it also seems a bit unwise to discard their ability to detect similarities. The only reason you can make a good analogy is because there is an underlying shared abstraction .

ggggtez 7y ago

The "superbug" would probably need to take the form of essentially "encrypting" the genes to make them impossible to recognize, but somehow still having a way to decode them. Could happen, but might also be evolutionarily difficult.

yetihehe 7y ago
That would be probably the best that can happen, because then you just target that one mechanism which just one superbug has. When it cannot decrypt properly, it dies. It also would be almost impossible, it's like one mutation that changes whole genome at once.

COGlory 7y ago

The smart thing to do (and this has already been done in vitro) is to use phages to deliver spacers guided to antibiotic resistance genes. That way, the cells delete their own antibiotic resistance genes, and the phages propagate the changes throughout the bacterial population. Bonus points if you use a budding phage.