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Impressive study, kudos to the bioinformaticians who did this! This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. In te

by Gatsky 5y ago

Impressive study, kudos to the bioinformaticians who did this! This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. In terms of gattaca style super people (which I find quite repugnant) the recombination events are still random at the end of the day, so you’d have to screen quite a few embryos and there would be trade-offs. If you were really serious about it, the process would start with selecting partners based on their genetic fitness, and also using young fathers.

bradleyjg 5y ago
This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. Most of the genetic disorders we know about can already be screened for (those that involve a single gene). This opens the door for polygenic screening but the underlying patterns to screen for are, in most cases, only weakly understood. We’d need to do a lot more research on adults with these diseases to get to the point where we can select against them in embryos. On top of that the amount of selection we can do is limited by the number of embryos to choose between. In many cases that’s a very small number.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  There are quite a lot of less severe conditions which aren’t easily testable on an embryo. That was the motivation for the research as I understand it. The whole polygenic thing isn’t very compelling, I agree.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    My understanding is monogenomic testing has gotten very extensive as well as less expensive and faster. It’s gotten to the point where if you can get genetic samples from the parents and all grandparents the only limitation is knowing what to look for.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I’m starting to look into this. We have a single uncommon mutation to deal with, that’s just a fairly large cancer risk. Early advice has been that it’s still pretty hard to do single gene mutation screens. Needing samples from multiple relatives with the mutation to build a reliable screen.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    My understanding is that it’s necessary to get genetic samples from both parents and best to get them from all four grandparents, but if you can’t get the grandparents they can still develop a test with slightly reduced accuracy if there are three or more embryos to sample.

by Gatsky 5y ago

bradleyjg 5y ago

This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. Most of the genetic disorders we know about can already be screened for (those that involve a single gene). This opens the door for polygenic screening but the underlying patterns to screen for are, in most cases, only weakly understood. We’d need to do a lot more research on adults with these diseases to get to the point where we can select against them in embryos. On top of that the amount of selection we can do is limited by the number of embryos to choose between. In many cases that’s a very small number.

Gatsky 5y ago
There are quite a lot of less severe conditions which aren’t easily testable on an embryo. That was the motivation for the research as I understand it. The whole polygenic thing isn’t very compelling, I agree.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  My understanding is monogenomic testing has gotten very extensive as well as less expensive and faster. It’s gotten to the point where if you can get genetic samples from the parents and all grandparents the only limitation is knowing what to look for.
oneoff786 5y ago
I’m starting to look into this. We have a single uncommon mutation to deal with, that’s just a fairly large cancer risk. Early advice has been that it’s still pretty hard to do single gene mutation screens. Needing samples from multiple relatives with the mutation to build a reliable screen.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  My understanding is that it’s necessary to get genetic samples from both parents and best to get them from all four grandparents, but if you can’t get the grandparents they can still develop a test with slightly reduced accuracy if there are three or more embryos to sample.