Welcome to Gaia! ::

KaiserXL
1,866 words
Comments please. <3

Genetic Engineering: A Wish Upon A Gene

Imagine a field of blue roses or a glow-in-the-dark cat. Imagine designing your future child to look exactly as you want them to. Imagine a world where starvation and disease no longer exist. This is the quest of genetic engineering; these are the dreams of geneticists: to create a world where everyone benefits from genetic engineering. Genetic Engineering is new, but with time, study, and practice, one day, plants, animals, and humans will all benefit from this science.

Gregor Mendel was one of the first genetic scientists to ever experiment with genetics. He explored heredity in pea pod plants by breeding them for favored traits like tallness or certain colors. Today, this is called classic selection and we still use the practice today when we breed plants and animals to create better organisms.

Mendel discovered that there are dominant and recessive genes in all living organisms. (E.g. One pea pod plant was white with the dominant white color gene and was bred with a pink pea pod plant with a recessive pink gene.) The offspring would be white plants because of the dominant gene. If, however, you bred two pink pea pod plants with the same pink color recessive gene together, the offspring would be pink because a dominant color gene is not present. The discoveries of Mendel gave geneticists a big leap on understanding genetics.

Another great contribution involving genetic engineering in plants was the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was the widespread use of modern agricultural techniques to increase the world’s food supply and also to reduce the threat of famine in the ‘60s. Norman Borlaug was an American plant breeder and wanted to help farmers around the world. At first, he told farmers to douse wheat plants with fertilizers to make them grow better but they grew so tall that they toppled over and died. Borlaug then tried out his knowledge of plant genetics to develop shorter but fuller wheat stalks. He taught farmers how to irrigate their fields and properly fertilize their plants. The resulting crops produced more than enough grain to feed the people of Mexico, and farmers were soon exporting the surplus to other countries. Around the world, the world’s food supply increased and the threat of famine was lifted.

Because of Mendel and Borlaug’s contributions, plant geneticists are working to identify dozens of stretches of DNA that help determine the size, shape, color, scent, flowering characteristics, and longevity of various plants. Reaching this goal is far away but geneticists have focused on four areas so far: extending shelf life, developing new fragrances, restoring old ones, and breaking the color barrier. Even though what scientists plan to do with plants in the future seems amazing, the main idea is to develop sturdy crops for farmers in other countries who have trouble producing enough food to feed their population.

One of the amazing things scientists plan to do is to create a blue rose. The problem is that roses don’t have the blue color in any of their genes so you can’t breed two roses together to make one. You have to insert a blue gene from a flower into a rose.

In 1986, an Australian company decided to re-launch the ancient quest for a blue rose. The original plan was to take the blue gene out of petunias and transfer it to roses, as well as to carnations and gerberas which don’t come in blue. But it wasn’t that easy. The blue gene from the petunias produced a class of enzymes called cytochrome P450, which had different forms. To find the right one, the company extracted one P450 producing gene fragment after another and transferred the most promising ones to petunias lacking the gene. It wasn’t until five years later that blue pollen appeared on white petunias.

Scientists learn through trial and error and the biologists of the Australian company learned that floral colors are products of more than pigment alone. A flower’s pigment resides within the vacuole and the environment of the vacuole differs from plant to plant. Its shape, acidity, metal ions, pigments, and the arrangement of these components all affect the color we see on a petal. In other words, we are still far away from seeing blue roses at a florist’s.

Have you ever picked a pretty flower that you particularly liked and went out of the way to put it in a beautiful vase with fresh water but after a few days, you found that the flower had wilted? You can now pick a bouquet of flowers without hesitating. Researchers in England and the Czech Republic genetically engineered plants that stay green and lush for several months after being cut and placed in water. The researchers identified a gene they labeled Sho (for shooting), which controls the production of hormones called cytokinins that delay the aging of plants. Increased levels of cytokinins also bolster plant resistance to disease and could prolong the shelf life of plants. This discovery could help the quest towards stopping world hunger when scientists finally create the suitable crop.

Scientists can prolong the shelf life of plants; why not prolong the life of animals or even resurrect them from the dead? Everyone had a pet that died and was very dear to them. Occasionally, you would wish they were alive again but at the time, you knew this could not be done. Scientists have now discovered a method to “revive” your pet: cloning.

Cloning animals involves putting the nucleus of an adult cell (or original animal cell) into an egg that has no nucleus. If the egg divides, it is then placed into a surrogate mother. But the clones don’t always come out identical to their original as they may have mutations in their DNA (E.g. the original and the clone may have different personalities).

Just recently, Japanese researchers managed to clone living pups from dead mice by extracting nuclei from two mouse brains and transferring them to mouse cells whose nuclei had been removed. This proved that ice crystals don’t damage the cell nuclei.

Imagine going to the zoo one day and you are walking through the elephant section and you see a giant hairy elephant with huge tusks. Someday, in the next few decades, you may see this sight yourself. Recently, a woolly mammoth mummy was found in the Siberian tundra and scientists planned to clone it by breeding the mammoth DNA into African elephants. Due to Mendel’s work, if scientists keep inserting mammoth DNA into a line of elephants, eventually you will get a full blooded woolly mammoth.

Scientists can also clone cells as they can clone animals. Cells form tissue and tissue forms organs and that’s where creating cells is handy. A study in 1993 carried out by Joseph Vacanti, at Children’s Hospital in Boston and Dr. Robert Langer, at MIT, showed that more than $400 billion is spent in the United States each year on patients with organ failure, including eight million surgeries. Even so, 4,000 die while waiting for a new organ, and another 100,000 die before even reaching the waiting list. Imagine what cell replacement can do for people in need of a new organ.

There is a huge product heading toward advanced clinical trials and the marketplace that promises to provide or stimulate replacement parts for skin, bone, teeth, blood vessels, cartilage in the knee and other sites, liver, pancreas, bladder, and spinal cord nerves. This product could save people’s lives when it is released to the public.

If scientists can replace organs by creating new cells, what else can they do with genetic engineering? There’s plenty more that they can do, like curing blindness. A new gene therapy treatment has restored some sight in blind patients suffering from Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA), a syndrome in which, because of a broken or missing gene called RPE65, retinal photoreceptor cells malfunction and eventually die. In two separate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and University College London, researchers injected viral particles carrying a working copy of RPE65 into six patients’ retinas. The virus then ferried the replacement gene into retinal cells.

After treatment, two of the six patients were able to navigate a dimly lit maze. In the University of Pennsylvania trial, all three patients did better reading lines on an eye chart. Most LCA sufferers have some vision as children but gradually grow completely blind by age 30. The adult subjects of these preliminary safety trials had already reached an advanced stage of the disease, which made the success of the treatment particularly promising.

Even though in the future, there may be a cure for blindness, you may still want to avoid your children having diseases like LCA or have a failing kidney. That’s why scientists have developed a technique called In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to design your baby. There are two different approaches to “designing your baby.” IVF involves choosing the type of sperm that will fertilize the egg to determine the sex and genes of the baby. The second approach, called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), is when embryos are screened for a genetic disease. Only selected embryos are put back in the mother’s womb. This is all in the near future because currently it is illegal to fix or add genes to create a Designer baby.

If designing your own baby to look a certain way sounds fun, scientists have had fun doing other things with genetic engineering. In a quest to find a way to determine when a waterway is contaminated, scientists added a natural fluorescence gene to some Zebrafish, resulting in GloFish® fluorescent zebrafish. GloFish® is the first genetically modified organism to be released as pets to the public. They come in three colors: Starfire Red, Electric Green, and Sunburst Orange. You can buy GloFish® at any pet store in the United States.

Other species have been developed to glow, but not under a black light like GloFish®, instead, they glow in the dark. The ability to glow in the dark is called bioluminescence and it happens in some animals naturally like squid, fireflies, and angler fish. Scientists in South Korea have recently cloned cats that can glow red in the dark after being exposed to ultra-violet light due to a red fluorescence gene in their DNA.

Genetic engineering can lead us to discover many cures for various diseases like cancer or muscular dystrophy. As proved by Norman Borlaug, we can end world hunger if we can genetically modify plants for starving countries. After working with animals and clones, scientists believe they can now correct genetic mutations in humans like illnesses or inherited, undesired traits.

In conclusion, genetic engineering is a beneficial science to everyone. Nothing is impossible and genes are in our nature, it is only human to study genetics, to better understand ourselves. The future of genetic engineering is bright and there is a better world waiting for us if we follow the path of genetic engineering.