jfarlow

34 ms·

241.
by jfarlow 10y ago
Yep. As was in the news a couple of days ago, sickle cell disease can be effectively 'cured' by installing an updated Hemoglobin protein [1]. (Some) Breast cancer associated genes have pretty well understood issues that can be e
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by jfarlow 10y ago
At the sub 10nm scale you need stiff linkages to have predictable and consistent structures. Covalent 'organic' bonds give you stiff linkages at that scale while metals are goopy and electronically inconsistent. Proteins are o
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by jfarlow 10y ago
More times than not protein fusions work just fine for the desired definition of 'work'. If you are trying to tune the very last efficiency out of an enzyme, or push one organism's survival efficiency past another's, the
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by jfarlow 10y ago
There are a lot of approaches, and they do not all require a brute force simulation. Nature herself seems to have a library of functional domains from which she can mix and match to produce a larger mechanical device - in addition to the a
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by jfarlow 10y ago
This is our software to help you build your own novel synthetic proteins if you want to give it a try yourself right now in your browser (built with Go and Ember!): https://serotiny.bio/ No knowledge of DNA or cloning techn
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by jfarlow 10y ago
That's a strong statement. I'd say it 'ceases to be trivially interpretable'. And I think this is part of where the 'the published paper said ___ so it must be true!' disparity between scientists and public be
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by jfarlow 10y ago
The lentivirus has a number of capabilities - insert into cell, insert into DNA, replicate payload, build capsid, encapsidate payload, escape cell. In this particular case the lentivirus was used both for it's 'insert into cell&#
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by jfarlow 10y ago
This treatment does not use CRISPR. It involves the hollowed out and repurposed lentivirus (similar in kind to HIV)[1]. The virus keeps it's own viral 'insert-into-DNA' machinery, but is stripped of its replication machiner
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Part of the beauty of these kinds of gene therapies is that the cost can ultimately be lowered to near-zero levels. These are not drugs that must be taken over a lifetime, but can potentially provide 1-time delivery of the instructions to y
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Ultimately, they are delivering a payload with a slightly modified version of wild-type hemoglobin (a single point mutation from wild-type). Patients with sickle-cell disease have a (different) mutation in their hemoglobin that causes the
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Justin here. We've spent the past two years building software to make the design of genetic tools easy and straightforward. I'm here to answer any questions about the software, it's capabilities, or the tech behind it. The
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Show HN: Pinecone – View, design, and manufacture your own genetic devices(serotiny.bio)
5 points by jfarlow 10y ago|1 comments
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by jfarlow 10y ago
With the new nested parameters pages become very powerful. There were a few ways to hack around the single list of parameters, but this permits building pretty strongly-logic'ed pages. Having a template be able to respond to arbitrary
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by jfarlow 10y ago
For better or worse, it now appears the Crispr system is an entire generic 'immune system' with many variants found across many species. It is not a singular exotic find. Though the most used variant of Cas9 was first found in the
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by jfarlow 10y ago
I've been collecting here socially interesting proteins and trying to better describe them in both plain language and in a computationally accessible form. We've also made software to help peer into, manipulate, and build your own
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Proteins of interest to Hacker News, and software to make your own(serotiny.bio)
1 points by jfarlow 10y ago|1 comments
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by jfarlow 10y ago
When DNA is copied the machine that does the copying must be already bound to the one of the strands of the two-stranded DNA. Physically, this means that the very first few bases of the DNA do not get copied by the machine, because the firs
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Do you happen to know which protein?
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Cows have a protein in their white blood cells helps to make nitric oxide (a molecule very toxic to bacteria, including tuberculosis). It has been shown in other instances that if you have more of the protein (NRAMP1), then you tend to be
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by jfarlow 10y ago
Justin here - cofounder of Serotiny. I'd be happy to field questions and take criticism and I am otherwise curious what you all think. Our goal is to make the design of powerful genetic tool as straightforward as possible. And to get
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Show HN: Pinecone – Synthetic protein design, a high level genetic design tool(serotiny.bio)
12 points by jfarlow 10y ago|1 comments