3 ms·
The title is misleading. But that doesn't mean gene silencing couldn't make someone very sick or cause fatal birth defects.
by bastawhiz 3y ago
The title is misleading. But that doesn't mean gene silencing couldn't make someone very sick or cause fatal birth defects.
- asdff 3y agoYou could eat kilos of this stuff and it would just be an interesting protein supplement. The sequence is specific to a gene in these insects its targeting. Even if it was human specific I doubt eating it would lead to anything. It would probably be degraded readily.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bastawhiz 3y agoI mean, would it? How confident are we that there's not a one in a billion chance it might silence a random gene in humans? Or that there aren't impurities introduced in the manufacturing process resulting in substances that silence other genes?
- asdff 3y agoEven if it did do something, there's a finite amount of it and it needs to be introduced into the cell in some way to have any effect. When siRNA experiments are done in a lab setting with human cells grown in a petri dish, one technique to make this happen is to actually shock the cells with just enough electricity to not kill them off, but to allow them to be in a certain state to take up the siRNA internally. Then, the effect only lasts as long as there is siRNA to silence mRNA transcripts. In other words over time normal expression patterns return as the siRNA is depleted and new mRNA is transcribed.