- [Instructor] So what is biotech?
Well, in reality, biotech today
is synonymous with genetic engineering,
where we modify plants and animals
and simple cells like
bacteria and whatnot.
So because of our revolution in DNA,
with our ability to manipulate it,
our ability to splice
things out, copied genes,
insert them into other organisms,
the sky's the limit or whatnot.
So we think of genetic engineering
when we think of biotech.
Now, a lot of times
people have a lot of questions about this,
and there's a lot of controversy
about genetically modified foods.
I'm gonna show you a video today
which illustrates some
of the dynamics of that,
and appropriately so.
We should ask those questions
because there are ramifications
on when we changed the genomes
of these various organisms.
But I'm gonna explain really what happens
when you create what we
call a transgenic organism.
'Cause that's all GMOs are.
GMO stands for genetically
modified organism.
We refer to it as a transgenic organism.
That's more appropriate
to what is actually done.
Transgenic means that you take
genes from another organism
and you insert them into a new organism.
So let me show you what's
done and how we do it
and what we can do with it.
If you know someone who
has type one diabetes,
then you usually know that they
have to go into the pharmacy
to be able to get insulin, human insulin.
Well, the big question becomes,
how do we manufacture human insulin?
Do we draw blood from lots of
people and then isolate it?
So what we used to do
in the past with cows,
we would take the cow blood,
we'd isolate the insulin
and people would inject cow
insulin into their blood
who had Type 1 diabetes.
Now we just manufacture the insulin.
So how do we do that?
Well, transgenics.
We take the human insulin gene.
There's a gene that makes
the human insulin protein.
We cut it out.
Now, how do we cut it out?
We don't have cells are small enough
to actually cut the DNA.
There are proteins, enzymes
that we actually took from bacteria
called restriction enzymes.
And these actually recognize
certain repetitive sequences of DNA
and will cut, will actually
cleave the covalent bond
that hold those nucleotides together.
So each restriction enzyme
is actually very specific
for a certain DNA sequence.
So we can exactly cut
out the gene that we want
from any organism.
So let's say we cut out
the human insulin gene,
which is what we do.
Well, the bacteria, they
have one large circular DNA,
as I mentioned before.
Well, we have to cut their DNA as well
in order to splice in the human DNA.
Now this is nothing
like those splice movies
where you get those alien human hybrids
or anything like that.
All we're doing is inserting a human gene
into the bacteria's genome.
Well, how do we put it back together?
Do you remember what type
of enzyme we've talked about
that can actually seal
broken polymers together?
- [Audience] Ligase.
- [Instructor] Ligase, exactly.
So we just take the ligase
and that will glue it back together.
It will literally covalently bond
these two fragments of DNA.
We put it back into the bacteria.
Now, if you remember what I
told you from last lecture,
bacteria DNA, our DNA, they treat it same
because we use the same coding sequence,
we use the same amino acid
to cotons relationship.
And so when the bacteria see this gene
and like, okay, I'll make
that, and it makes that gene,
it's making human insulin.
Then all we do is kill the bacteria,
extract the protein.
We can mass manufacture proteins this way.
This is how vaccinations are made.
This is how insulin human growth hormone.
You think it probably we're making it.
Even industrial chemicals can be made
by manufacturing and breaking
down certain organics
to make ethanol and acetone
and things of that sort.
So that's commonly used today.
Now most of the time people are like,
I don't have any problem with that.
What they do have a problem with is GMOs
or the food that is modified.
Let me explain how that's done
because these are also
transgenic organisms
and we have to ask the question,
what ramifications does
it have on our health,
on the health of an ecosystem?
These are good questions to ask.
All right, so in the past,
farmers used to spray their
fields as they still do today
with a bacteria that
usually secretes a protein
that's toxic to an insect.
Well, what scientists have done
is instead of spraying the
plant with the protein,
they cut that protein out of the bacteria
by pulling out the gene
and then splicing it into
the plant's genetics.
So here we're doing the opposite.
Instead of taking human genes
and putting them into a bacteria,
we're taking bacteria and genes
and we're putting them
into a more vast organism
like a plant.
Once the plant takes that gene up,
then its cells actually
manufacture that protein.
And now, instead of
having to spray the plant,
they have that natural insecticide.
It's not natural, so to speak,
but it is created by the plants cells,
and so in that regard, now
the pesticides in there.
Well, some people were like, (grunts)
we got these pesticides in there.
What does it do to us?
Well, not really anything,
but there's still the
question of allergens,
there's the question of ecological
and evolutionary change.
And these are important questions to ask.
I'll show later on when
we get into evolution,
some of those changes that occur.
- [Woman] I'm just curious to know,
what kind of instruments do we have to use
to actually grab something
so small as an amino acid?
- [Instructor] Technically
we don't just get the one.
Technically we chew it
all up, we separate it out
and then we isolate it
based upon a process
which I'll explain in a second
called gel electrophoresis.
Now we wouldn't be able
to do any of these things
without an amplification process.
'Cause we don't just take a
cell and the cut the DNA out.
We take millions of cells, we
cut millions of those DNAs,
we isolate that out, and
then when we recombine them,
it's just the process of
so many of them together.
Some of them are gonna
recombine and then we do that.
So the process itself is
actually much more complex
than what's being illustrated
here, but it's very easy.
I mean, we could do it
even here in the lab.
Now, if that weren't enough,
we have transgenic animals
where you have fish
that we've actually put a
jellyfish protein into it.
These fluorescent jellyfish,
it's a protein called GFP or
green fluorescent protein.
There's actually many different types
of fluorescent proteins.
And most of the time
when we do it in animals,
it's mainly for research,
though this one is actually
commercially available
and for fun, though most
things are done for research.
But it really brings
up those questions of,
should we be doing this?
Now as far as research goes,
there's a lot we can learn
by putting these proteins into effect
or these mice that we
genetically engineered
to where their bone cells would glow.
And so we'd put them under the UV light
and their skeletons would glow green.
And that was hereditary.
We actually are able to
make some of these genes
get transmitted from one
generation to the next,
not just in the one organism,
but it was incorporated into their genome.
So that's what a transgenic organism is.
It's essentially any organism
that has a foreign gene
inserted into it, okay?
And then you have to ask the question,
well, what purpose is it?
Is it for fun?
Is it for research?
Is it for medicinal use?
Because there are
ramifications of doing so
in our crops and in our
animals and whatnot.
They in fact had genetically
modified some fish,
gave 'em some growth hormone
and they became bigger and
they threw 'em into a lake
and they out competed all the other fish
and destroyed the ecosystem.
So mistakes are made, okay?
I'm not saying that we should do this,
but I'm also saying that there
are reasons to do it as well.
There's pros and cons.
And that's why it's kind of, not kind of,
it's very controversial because
what are we doing it for
and what are the things
that it's being used for?
Here's another concept that's
critical for biotechnology
as I was alluding to.
Without this process,
nothing would be possible
in genetic engineering.
It's called the polymerase chain reaction.
Now you see the word polymerase before.
What is that?
Do you remember?
What does DNA polymerase do?
Basically copies the DNA.
Remember the polymerase
will look at the nucleotides
and actually create a copy of it.
So the polymerase chain reaction
was something that was
invented in the '70s
about 20 years after Watson and Crick,
where they finally learned
how to amplify DNA,
millions of times over.
In fact, this process is
so abundantly used today.
Most biotech students
don't know life without it.
I've been using it for
quite a while now too
ever since I was in it.
But back in the '70s when they started it
and they kind of perfected it
another 10 to 15 years later or whatnot,
to the point where
it's just common household
every day procedures that we do.
Well, what the process is...
And this is what applies to DNA
fingerprinting and forensics
and paternity tests, and
we'll get into that today too.
Is when you have a sample
of DNA in the past,
you really weren't able
to work much with it
because you had a couple
of cells, drop of blood
or something like that,
you really didn't have
much DNA to work with
and you couldn't do much with it.
But with PCR or polymerase chain reaction,
theoretically, you could take one cell,
usually it takes more than that,
but theoretically one cell,
and what happens is when you
go through this process of PCR,
it essentially splits the DNA, copies it,
splits it, copies it,
splits it, copies it,
it's essentially an exponential process
where one becomes two, two
becomes four, four becomes eight.
After about 30 rounds of this,
you have over 10 million
copies of the DNA.
And that takes about, it depends
upon the machine you have,
takes about an hour, hour
and a half to do that, okay?
Very rapid.
In fact, the FBI use this process so much.
They have these machines
that go through the,
what we call thermal cycling so fast
that they can do it in
a matter of minutes,
like five minutes or so.
So PCR is a way of taking
a small sample of DNA
and amplifying it millions of times over.
Now from a drop of blood
from a crime scene,
a swab of cells from a cheek,
we can amplify enough DNA
to where we can start
doing things with it.
Before this process, it
just was too difficult
to do what we do today with that.
Now you're not gonna have to
describe to me how PCR works.
In fact, I pretty much left out
most of the mechanics of it.
But you will need to tell me
what it is and what it does.
Essentially it's an amplification process.
It's where you take a small sample of DNA
and you essentially make
millions of copies of it.
Now, once that was developed,
there were a number of things we could do
with that much DNA.
One of the first things
developed was sequencing.
So we're getting into what we
now call DNA profiling, okay?
So if you look on my notes
and I said DNA profiling,
just like when we look at
someone and we profile them
based upon their features and whatnot,
DNA profiling is how
do we analyze the DNA?
When we look at it, what are we analyzing?
What are we trying to figure out?
So the first type of profiling of your DNA
is called sequencing.
So all sequencing is,
is learning the order of
the nucleotides, okay?
All you're doing when
you're sequencing DNA,
it's you're learning what
order the nucleotides in.
AT CC GGG TAT.
Well, what does that teach us?
Well, remember we just
learned about mutations
and how sometimes people
have point mutations,
this will let you know
whether you have a point mutation or not.
So let's say you think you
have Huntington's disease
or because your parents had it or whatnot,
and you want your DNA sequenced
and profiled in that regard,
then you would take a cheek sample,
or a blood sample usually,
send it into a company.
We've got Myriad Genetics
up here in Salt Lake
that essentially does that type of thing
and they'll sequence your DNA.
And what they'll do is they
won't look at all of your DNA.
They'll look at certain parts.
Like if you're worried
about certain diseases,
they'll look at parts of your genes
that have those diseases
and they'll look for those mutations.
They'll look to see if where
you should have a C here,
you have a G there.
And they're like, oh yeah,
that's gonna cause Huntington's disease.
And that's what we can do today.
So DNA sequencing really just shows you
what order your nucleotides are in
and that tells you
whether or not you have
a type of mutation.
All right, now we've
gotten really good at this.
Back in the day, it took over a decade
to sequence the whole human genome.
I bet you wanna venture a guess
on how much time it takes now.
Here 16, 15 years later, or so.
It takes about two weeks.
That's it, two weeks.
15 years later and we can do
what took us 10 years in the
past now two weeks to do.
That's how fast we're advancing in this...
In fact, it's getting cheaper and cheaper
to the point where for
about a thousand or $2,000,
you can have your genome sequence.
Now this brings up a number
of other issues as well,
because let's say you get
that profile of your genes,
and then somebody says, oh,
you're gonna have Huntington's disease,
and you're a carrier for cystic fibrosis
and (speaks gibberish)
and you don't want your
insurance company to see that.
I mean, those are the real questions
that we have to ask today.
Do we want our profile out
there for the world to see?
All right, now, before we
get into DNA fingerprinting,
which is another way to profile your DNA,
I have to explain this process.
You're not gonna be
tested on this process,
but I need to explain it so
you understand how it works.
It's called gel electrophoresis.
Now, if you think of jello,
you know that jello hardens
because we put some gelatin in there
and it ultimately coalesces
and formed this matrix.
Well, in a similar fashion,
we use a substance called augurous
that's an extract from
seaweed and whatnot,
to create this gel.
Now, this gel has these microscopic pores
that allows the DNA to go through.
When we put DNA on one end of the gel,
we pass a current through the gel.
The negative end is on this end,
the positive ends on this end.
Well, DNA is negatively charged.
So it's going to run
towards the positive end
through the gel.
Well, here's the thing.
The longer strands of DNA
are gonna weave through the gel
much slower than the shorter strands.
So this is essentially a
way of separating out DNA
based upon its size.
So if there's a DNA fragment
that's a hundred nucleotides
long, that'll run really fast.
If you have another DNA fragment,
that's a thousand nucleotides
long, that'll run much slower.
So depending upon the length of the DNA,
you can resolve it out to
where you have this pattern.
All right?
So here's just kind of in a sample
of an everyday gel that we would run.
Those fragments down
here are much shorter.
They only have maybe a hundred
or 50 nucleotides to them.
And as you go up here, these
are ones that run much slower.
They're much longer, maybe a thousand,
3000 nucleotides long, okay?
Now let's talk about what
a DNA fingerprint is.
'Cause you hear about this all the time.
And most people just think
it's used for forensics,
but it's not.
It's used for paternity tests.
It's used for genealogical work
or disaster identification.
There's many applications to it.
So let's look at what a DNA
fingerprint actually is,
and then see why
it can actually have these
different applications.
Not all of your DNA encodes genes.
In fact, only a small
percentage of your DNA
actually encodes genes, 2%.
Well what's in the rest of the 98%.
Well in some areas, these are
non-gene encoding regions,
so there are areas that
don't have any genes to them,
we have these repetitive
nucleotide sequence
called short tandem repeats.
Now what's fascinating
is they're in all of us,
and they're all in the same places
as all of our chromosomes.
If you look on one person's chromosome
in a particular location
at his short tandem repeat,
you'll find the same location
has short tandem repeats as well.
But here's the thing.
Like genes, even though they're not genes,
like genes are subject to mutations.
So over the years what's happened is
sometimes they've been
added or duplicated.
Sometimes they've been
taken away or whatnot.
So when we look at all of our DNA,
then we find that most of
our short tandem repeats
are a little bit different
from one another.
For example, this and
has short tandem repeats
that repeat five times.
So the repeats go CTA, CTA CTA.
It does that five times.
Over here, this person has
seven of those repeats.
CTA, CTA, it does it seven times.
Well, remember when we talked
about gel electrophoresis.
If what man has repeats of seven long
and another man has repeats of five long,
which one's gonna run a little bit faster?
- [Audience] Five long.
- The five, 'cause it's shorter.
The fewer the nucleotides,
the faster it's gonna run
on the gel, all right?
So let's look at a certain situation.
Now, you'd get a drop of blood
or cheek swab from a suspect,
or you have some semen
or something with DNA
because all of our cells
pretty much have DNA.
And you grab it and you
need to amplify the DNA.
So what the scientists do is they use PCR
to copy this region
over and over and over.
That now gives them enough
material to work with
to run the gel.
Normally a drop of
blood wouldn't be enough
to do a gel electrophoresis,
but because of PCR, now we can.
Now they still have to find suspects
because the DNA itself
can't tell you usually
who your suspect is.
It just gives you the DNA of the person.
So in the past,
this guy would have been
immediately thrown in jail
because of this shifty look in nature
and this guy would have
gone out scot free.
But as it turns out
his DNA matches the crime scene evidence.
Now let me explain something
about our short tandem repeats.
We have two of every type.
We have two of every type of repeats.
Where do we get them from?
We get them from both of our parents.
So this guy right here,
one of his chromosomes
he got from his father,
the other chromosome
he got from his mother.
His father gave him 12 repeats
and his mother gave him 12 repeats.
Over here this guy same thing.
He got one from his mother,
one from his father.
In this case, his mother gave him 12
and his father gave him 16,
because we inherited our
chromosomes from our parents.
That's how it works.
Now when you run them out on the gel,
notice because his repeats
are exactly the same,
they look like one band because
they run at the same speed.
But over here, because his
repeats are of different lengths,
the gel electrophoresis will
actually separate the DNA
based upon its length.
And there behold it matches up.
Now, if we were to just do this
with one set of short tandem repeats,
it really wouldn't tell us much
because likelihood, if you're
part of the same ethnic group,
you typically have a lot in common.
However, when you look across
five, six or seven different chromosomes,
that's when the
fingerprint becomes unique.
So look here.
On the sides we have
what are called ladders.
These are known fragments
of DNA, eight repeats long.
Nine, 10, 11, 12.
That's just a measurement system.
So over here, we've got 13 individuals
that are all being profiled.
Notice individuals two, four, and five,
all have the same pattern.
They have repeats of 12 and 13.
So you really can't
distinguish between those two
or those three individuals
just by that one.
Well, let's move down to the another.
These are chromosomes over
here that we're looking at.
Now, their patterns are different.
Here these two guys are the same.
This one's different.
These are all different.
So you can see that once you look across
about six different chromosomes,
each person's pattern is
gonna be unique, right?
So we don't just look at one.
We always look at several
and that's how a DNA fingerprint works.
You're able to say this blood
or this semen or this skin,
or this spit or whatever the case may be,
is the same DNA as this person.
Now you still have to
do other types of things
to determine guilty and
other stuff like that,
but that's what a fingerprint does.
That blood is his, not his.
And that's really where
forensics comes into play.
Well, how do we use fingerprint?
How do we use this for in our
fingerprint, paternity test?
How do we do a paternity test?
Well, let me show you.
Let's say you have two
fathers in question.
'Cause it's usually not
the mother in question.
Now they have a child
and when you look at the
child's short tandem repeats,
he has his profile.
So let's just look at one, okay?
And we're gonna keep it simple.
Let's say he has short tandem
repeats of three and five.
Now here's how sexual reproduction works.
Each parent will pass on
half of their genetics,
which means that the profile of the child
has to have half of its short
tandem repeats from the mother
and half from the biological father, okay?
So in this version, one of these,
we don't know which one
necessarily, sometimes we do,
but one of these has to
come from one parent,
one comes from the other.
Well, let's do the mother here.
Let's say that she has repeats
of three and four, all right?
Let's look at this father.
Let's say has repeats of six and seven
and this one has repeats
of five and eight.
So who do we say is the father?
One or two?
- [Audience] Two.
Why?
Because we know the three
came from the mother,
but he doesn't have a five.
He doesn't have a five to give him.
He couldn't have been
the biological father
because he couldn't pass it on.
Now, sometimes this
occurs and you're like,
okay, I got to look at another one.
That's why you don't just look at one.
You look at six or seven
and there has to be that
matching up between the parents.
That's where you get that 99%
probability of the parents.
So that's really how
paternity tests are done.
Because we know that a child
inherits half of the
genetics from each parent,
that also means
that they have to receive half
of the short tandem repeats
from one and half of them from the other.
Let's look at another child.
Let's say that there's two siblings
and we still wanna figure
out where the parents are.
Let's say the child is four and eight.
Did it come from the same father?
- [Audience] Mm-hmm.
- [Instructor] Why?
These two are siblings, rightfully so.
Even though they don't have
the exact same short tandem repeats.
Why?
Because in sexual reproduction,
it's a crap shoot which one you pass on.
It's a 50, 50 chance of which genes,
which chromosomes you pass on.
You give half of your
genetics to your child.
So in this scenario,
when the sperm and the egg came together,
this was the combination of genetics.
In this scenario just as plausible,
that's the combination.
- [Soft Spoken Man] Do identical twins
have the same short tandem repeats?
- [Instructor] Yes, they do,
because they are from a
single fertilization event
and the embryonic mass splits
through DNA duplication.
They're gonna have the exact
same short tandem repeats.
We can still differentiate between twins
because mutations do accumulate over time
and even their fingerprints,
on their fingers,
90% of your fingerprint is
environmentally determined.
So even identical twins
don't have exactly the same fingerprint.
So they're gonna be similar,
but not exactly the same.
But their genetics will be
exactly the same initially.
Okay, so let's do a couple
practice questions with this.
Let's pull out your clickers.
But that's how paternity
test's essentially done.
You take the blood from the
mother, blood from the father
or cheek swab, and you take
the DNA sample from the child,
you do the profile and all three of them,
and the child needs to have
matched up one from each parent
for them to be the biological offspring
of those two parents.
Now the same thing could be done
if you wanna see if someone's
really your sibling.
You'll share half of the short
tandem repeats statistically
with your sibling.
So you won't have the exact same,
but you will share 50% of
those short tandem repeats.
So they can look at sibling
heritage.
I don't know,
for me a little genetics and whatnot.
Here we go.
Okay, now remember that this
is on a simplified level.
So if it can be assumed
that the parents are the genetic parents,
then you assume that.
If it's not possible,
then we assume that
they're not the biological parents, okay?
So just keep that in mind
'cause I've had some people be like, well.
Most of the time people
just remember forensics
'cause that's what we think of
when we think of DNA fingerprint.
But now you know
that it can also be used
for paternity tests.
Well, what about some of these others?
Let's look at disaster identification.
In 911, there were a lot of individuals
that just couldn't be found,
but they did find body parts,
and they wanted to be able to know
whether these individuals
had died in that tragedy.
So what they would do is they
would take the tissue samples,
they ran the profile.
Well, they needed
something to compare it to.
So they'd typically go
back to the person's home,
find a comb with some
hair follicles in it,
where they had some cells from their hair
and they're able to match them up.
And this is how a lot of
people were identified
where you normally
wouldn't be able to know
whether or not they had
died in some tragedy
due to the inability to identify them.
But biologically we're
able to identify them
because of matching up the DNA, okay?
Now, how does historical
investigations work?
Well, it works like paternity tests,
but on a very large scale
because humans tend to
reside in the same area,
the same populations,
the same ethnic groups.
That's not always the case,
but more often than not,
you tend to have similar genes, not genes,
similar short tandem repeats
to certain populations.
So due to the fact that they have taken
a number of samples in
populations all over the world,
that they can look at
the similarities and say,
oh, you had some parentage back
in Africa so many years back
or back in Europe, you're
of European descent.
So they can actually look
at your genealogical history
by comparing your short tandem repeats
to the population statistics,
and we're using that quite
often now to look to say,
well, where should I be
looking for my parentage?
Where should I be looking
for generations back?
'Cause some people may not even know.
Now here's the thing a DNA
fingerprint does not do.
It does not tell you
anything about your genetics
and your proteins.
It doesn't tell you
anything about your genes.
I should say genes, not genetics.
Doesn't tell you anything
about your genes.
It doesn't tell you
whether you're gonna have cystic fibrosis
or sickle cell anemia,
or whether you're predisposed
to Huntington's disease
or cancer or whatever the case may be.
So a fingerprint
looks at the non-gene
encoding parts of your DNA,
these regions which we
call short tandem repeats.
They have nothing to do
with how your insulin's made
or how the proteins that
regulate the cell cycle
and make it so you don't
get cancer are regulated.
Nothing to do with those.
So it's only for DNA
comparison, sample comparison.
Oh, that blood's his.
Oh, this child shares half
of each of these two parents,
paternity tests and so on and so forth.
It's about comparisons,
but it doesn't tell you anything
about the person's profile
in terms of what diseases they might have.
Now, that's what DNA sequencing can do.
If you're questioning whether or not
you have inherited a particular
mutation from your parents,
you can go get your DNA sequence,
not all of it, but certain regions.
And this has also comes into
cancer research as well.
A lot of times there are multiple genes.
Now there's a better way of doing it
than just having all your gene sequenced.
Sometimes there are known
hereditary mutations,
and there's a quicker way
to look at hundreds of genes
at the same time.
And this is the third
way to profile your DNA.
It's called a DNA microarray.
Now, I'm not gonna go through the dynamics
of how this is done, but I
will tell you what it's for.
It essentially profiles
hundreds of genes at a time.
You don't have to look at one at a time.
You could profile hundreds
of genes at a time. (coughs)
There's two main reasons
why we use this today.
One, research where we're looking at
any number of questions of proteins
and how they behave in the cells,
but more importantly for
medicinal reasons cancer,
because there are so many different genes
that can cause cancer.
And this is where we're attacking
our endeavors to cure cancer today
is first diagnosing
what's causing the cancer
and then treating it, okay?
So a microarray, it can't
tell you who your parents are
or whether or not your parents
are your biological parents.
It doesn't compare two samples of DNA.
What it does do is profile
hundreds of genes at a time,
and lets whether you have known
mutations that cause cancer
or Huntington's disease
or cystic fibrosis.
You don't have to look at one at a time.
You can look at hundreds at a time, okay?
So don't worry about the
dynamics of how that's done,
but there are these little microchips
that have these known mutations on them
and if your DNA hybridizes with it,
then you're like, oh, you've got that.
So those are the three types of profiles.
DNA sequencing, DNA fingerprinting,
and a DNA microarray.
Now here's the other thing
that a microarray can't do.
It can't tell you specifically
if you've got an unknown mutation.
The only one that can
do that is sequencing.
Sequencing is the only way
to know exactly what type
of mutation you have.
Is it a frameshift, is it a point mutation
and whether or not it's
gonna cause problems.
So there's pros and cons
to all three of these.
Now in the last few minutes we have here,
I told you this was a short one.
This is the last concept
and then we'll do more
review on Thursday from this.
This is a big controversial topic too,
stem cell therapy or working
with stem cells today.
So this is also part of biotechnology
because it comes into play
that most of the time when
we do cloning of some type,
we're usually manipulating the genetics.
Sometimes we're manipulating
the entire genome
and transplanting it from one to another.
Other times we're just
looking at the stem cells.
So here's first a quick review or recap
on what stem cells are.
There are two main types of stem cells.
There are what we call
embryonic stem cells.
And these are usually found in the fetus
as the embryos developing.
These cells typically have the potential
to become any type of cell in the body.
So here's what we call a blastocyst.
This is before it
implants into the uterus.
These cells right here are what become you
and all of these cells
have the potential to become
any cell in your body.
You have about 256 different cell types
and these cells can
become any one of those.
So the potential for
these embryonic stem cells
is that let's say someone
needs a replacement of neurons
because of some
neurodegenerative disorder,
or they need a muscle
graft or a skin graft,
or let's say they need to renew
certain elements of their blood.
We can take embryonic stem cells
and turn them into any
one of those cell types.
That's the potential of them.
Well, there's another type of stem cell
called adult stem cells.
These don't have as much
potential as the embryonic
and you have adult stem cells
in every organ of your body.
You've got them in your blood.
These stem cells have the
potential to regenerate
all of your blood, but
really nothing else.
You've got them in your liver,
they regenerate your liver tissues,
you've got them in your heart,
they regenerate your heart tissues.
So the adult stem cells
are found in your organs.
They pretty much just renew that organ.
That's really the limitation
is they can renew cells within that organ
like your skin or whatnot.
So there's pros and cons
to using both of these
types of stem cells.
Now for testing purposes,
I'm gonna look at two
different types of cloning.
the first type of cloning can
use either type of stem cell.
We call it therapeutic cloning.
Now what's a perfect example
of therapeutic cloning today?
Bone marrow transplant, okay?
So a bone marrow transplant,
we know that when somebody
has maybe cancer like leukemia
and they get it radiated and
it destroys their immune system
it destroys the cells that
make their immune system,
then they actually need
stem cells from a donor
so that they can regenerate
their immune system
and the red blood cells
and their platelets.
So that's where bone marrow
transplant comes into play.
So therapeutic cloning
is all about tissue and cell regeneration,
where you take cells from someone else
and you use it and graft it onto someone.
Now they're getting even better at this
to where they can actually take stem cells
from your own body and
cause them to grow rapidly
and then use those to
regenerate your own body.
So you're using your own adult stem cells,
you're just speeding up the process.
In fact with skin regeneration,
they're finding that they can do this
on a matter of a couple of days
where they take your skin cells,
they put them in this media
and after an hour and a half
they put it back on
like a burn or some area
and it completely renews the skin.
So they're getting really good
at advanced stem cell therapy
and how to use it to regenerate tissues
for therapeutic purposes.
So therapeutic cloning
is the cloning of cells
for tissue or cell regeneration.
However, this does not
apply to organ regeneration
nor to cloning the whole organism.
That's where reproductive
cloning comes into play.
And this is the controversial one
because reproductive cloning
is essentially what you think
of when you think of cloning,
where you make an exact
copy of the organism.
Now we've gotten so good at this
that we can do it with
cats and dogs and mice
and most animals.
And the thing is plants naturally do this.
They naturally clone themselves.
If you've ever potato farm,
where you cut pieces of potato off
and you throw them in
with some fertilizer,
they'll grow back into a
whole plant by themselves.
Carrots, other plants
they'll clone themselves.
So we don't have to do anything
for them to reproductively
clone themselves.
It's mainly animals that we
have the hardest time with
because they pretty much just
undergo sexual reproduction
which is not a cloning process.
So how do we do it?
What is the actual process of cloning?
It's obviously much harder than
what I'm gonna present here,
but here's the fundamental basis of it.
You get an egg donor and you take that egg
and you remove the genetic
material of that egg.
You take the cells from
the animal to be cloned,
and we started with the sheep,
but since we've moved on to
cats and dogs and other things,
you take the nucleus out of those cells
and put it into the embryonic egg cell.
You let it grow up in a
Petri dish several times,
put it into the surrogate
mother and plant it
and essentially grows up
and it is a genetic clone of that.
Any defects that that organism had
the clone will have, okay?
So you were literally
cloning the same genetics
into a new organism is like
having an identical twin.
Now what are the purposes of
this beyond just research?
Well, if you've ever seen
the movie "The Island"
and other stuff like that,
one of the biggest issues that we have
is we cannot create organs.
Organs can only really be
regenerated as the organism grows.
Now we're getting better
at being able to regenerate organs,
but organs are so complex
with different types of tissues and cells
that it's very difficult to make them
But we're getting better, like I said.
We are being able to use
a moreso today stem cells
to regenerate kidneys and
other types of organs.
We're getting there, but
we're not quite there yet.
Most of the time reproductive
cloning in animals
is primarily used for research,
but some people really love
their cat or their dog,
and you can clone them.
Why you'd wanna cone a
clone cat, I don't know.
The hugs maybe.
So...
