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New CRISPR systems hold promise for genome editing
- alumelot 3y agoIt's held "promise" for quite some years now lol. Besides there are a ton of hurdles still that need to be solved. Just a hyperbolic headline.
- thenerdhead 3y agoPretty exciting given the last type was discovered in 2016. Science publication here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1910 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1910 Here's the main takeaway I got: A fast locality-sensitive hashing-based clustering (FLSHclust) algorithm was developed. This algorithm is parallelized and scales linearly with the size of the dataset, enabling efficient analysis of large sequence databases. That means it can scale with exponentially growing datasets, discover rare biological systems, provide more options for targeted gene editing, and even lead to novel biotechnologies. Sounds like a breakthrough to me!
- ttmoney1234 3y agoDo you by chance know if this is open access anywhere? There are heuristics like finding contigs where the mmseqs results from two different searches are close, and it's not clear to me if this would be much better than that.
- thenerdhead 3y agoI don't know, sorry. I usually get my research directly from a student account / library access and I also get the physical magazines.
- foota 3y agoWake me up when I can get the short sleep genes :-)
- iamthejuan 3y agoI remember an Asian man who never sleeps for already decades without affecting his health. In his case, he was not born a non sleeper but developed probably due to a traumatic experience. There are videos about him in Youtube if you are interested.
- haraball 3y agoThey recently discovered the gene for shyness. It was hiding behind two other genes.
- nharada 3y agoAt this point I'll settle for the "good sleep" genes
- foota 3y agoIf it wasn't clear, this is actually a real thing. See e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep (of course whether it would actually be possible to just pick this up via gene therapy is untested, and I think gene therapies are hard in the brain because of the blood-brain barrier). One of my roommates in college had this and was able to get by fine with 5 hours of sleep a night, I was always envious.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoPSA: it's not as simple as: alter a gene, see an effect. There are complex regulatory networks involving genes which code for "chromatin remodeler" proteins which go around altering the degree to genes are expressed. Even if we can equip new CRISPR with vi keybindings and start pushing commits, we're testing in production and are still quite foggy about how the feature flags work.
- huytersd 3y agoAre all people production? Even death row inmates?
- maximus-decimus 3y agoDepends, do you want Musk to bribe judges to condemn more people to death penalty so he gets more human brain chip test subjects? To be clear, I'm not saying Musk would do that... but that kind of system would really be encouraging it.
- usrnm 3y agoYes?
- Faaak 3y agoDang it, we have no more death row test subjects left. Let's falsely accuse someone of murder
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoYes. If you want a staging environment you can use Neurospora Crassa.
- huytersd 3y agoThat’s not even close to staging. That’s more like a local dev environment on a dev’s pc with quickly generated mock data.
- RobotToaster 3y ago