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I believe this suggests that we could CRISPR an embryo to knock-out the offending Alu element in the TBXT gene and the child will develop a tail.
by joshuamcginnis 3y ago
I believe this suggests that we could CRISPR an embryo to knock-out the offending Alu element in the TBXT gene and the child will develop a tail.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoRarely is human genetics this simple. For ages geneticists thought large swaths of the human genome were "junk" and over time more and more of it has been proven to have a purpose or function, it just wasn't readily apparent for various reasons. Think of the human genome as sort of the ultimate dependency hell...
- npstr 3y agoNature does not refactor. There's the laryngeal nerve somewhere in the neck of mammals that has to go around a blood vessel. On Giraffes, this runs all the way down the neck, around said blood vessel, than back up, all that just to connect two places in the upper neck that are inches apart. Evolution writes the ultimate spaghetti code. More info: https://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011/08/unintelligent-design-giraffes-laryngeal.html https://berto-meister.blogspot.com/2011/08/unintelligent-des...
- xeonmc 3y agoGod must be a frontend developer.
- linux2647 3y agoOr hacked it all together in Perl: https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoHe's definitely full stack.
- temporalparts 3y agoNature rarely* refactors. Sometimes random mutations refactors, which leads to efficiencies which leads to evolutionary advantages. If nature doesn't refactor, then why are there so many crabs?
- kirubakaran 3y agohttps://youtu.be/cO1a1Ek-HD0?si=H6X6ICZQLbq_s41C https://youtu.be/cO1a1Ek-HD0?si=H6X6ICZQLbq_s41C The famous Richard Dawkins video about that (4min long)
- Grimblewald 3y agonoodly its appendage, sphagetti its code, in its image we are made, amen.
- Phemist 3y ago*ramen
- loud_cloud 3y ago"Octopus throat runs through brain" and the "blood supply in FRONT of the retina cones n rods" were the other 2 that are often mentioned.
- username3 3y ago[flagged]
- dingdingdang 3y agoNature does not refactor, except when it does as in the case of going from 48 to 46 chromosomes (great apes->humans). Nice write-up and slightly novel hypothesis at: https://molecularcytogenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13039-016-0283-3 https://molecularcytogenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
- ItCouldBeWorse 3y agoNature hires a million devs and then kills the project if they do not hit a deadline.Nature mixes it up with sex and creatures hunting one another. There are no chill moments.
- water-data-dude 3y agoEarly developmental biology (by “early” I mean early pregnancy) is the shit you Do Not Touch. Each step of development is highly dependent on the previous steps (assuming this bit’s here, that bit’s there, etc.). If you make a change it’s extremely likely to be fatal or have negative consequences like birth defects, and the likelihood of a bad outcome climbs steeply as you move the change earlier and earlier in the process. That’s why pretty much every animal - humans, tigers, whales, lizards - looks the same when they’re a teeny tiny little fetus. My example is testicles! Testicles begin in the same place as ovaries, which made a lot of sense back when we were coldblooded! Having a pair of balls dangling in a soft pouch between your legs isn’t a strategy you adopt if you can help it. In the alternate timeline where lizard people rose to dominate the earth instead of humans they don’t have “Ouch, I’ve been hit in the balls!” humor. But the testicles form next to the kidneys early on in the developmental process (and as we’ve established, you don’t fuck with those stages), so they have to migrate south VERY late in the development! Because they SCHLOOP on down after everything else is pretty much in place, it weakens the abdominal wall, which is why men are more prone to certain types of hernias than women are.
- Zetobal 3y agoThere still is a lot of non-coding dna in there.
- 3seashells 3y ago[dead]
- samus 3y agoIf it didn't fulfil a function, then random mutations and deletions during Meiosis would quite quickly get rid of it. Even if it only serves to support the structure of chromosomes or some similarly arcane purpose that we will only discover in a decade or so, it still has a function.
- kennethwolters 3y agoYes, the genome-layer is nondeterministic. But there are also more layers that are probably just as nondeterministic, adding more complexity to your view. Other layers include: epigenome-layer, transcriptome-layer, proteome-layer Each layer can compensate for deficiencies in another layer. So lets say you knock out a gene in utero and it has a phenotype. But when you do the same procedure in an adult organism, there is no phenotype, although the gene should be important in an adult. It's like phenotype and genotype are two states whose correlation is dependent on many variables. In this example at least time.
- BizarroLand 3y agoThe first domino between the present and a world full of cat girls has fallen.
- swader999 3y agoAt what age would it be too late to try this? Asking for a friend...
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoIt needs to be done at the embryonic stage before cell division so that as the cells replicate, they inherit the desired changes. The technology isn't quite there yet to transfect every single cell in an adult body with a virus containing the desired genetic modifications. Also, I can only imagine the downstream of effects of the body transcribing this modified dna in a fully-developed human. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly?
- swader999 3y agoLoved the fly!
- speedylight 3y agoThe holy grail of gene editing will be when we can make “permanent” changes to the DNA of people alive today.
- neonsunset 3y agoCatgirls may be closer than we think.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]