Reproduction is a very important biological
process in life to create new individual organisms.
These new individuals contain genetic information
from both parents. To be more specific, eleven
chromosomes of the mum and eleven chromosomes
of the dad and dependent on being a boy or
a girl an X and Y chromosome or two X chromosomes.
After the fusion of an egg and sperm cell,
the cells will divide and organs are formed.
Sometimes during these divisions, things go
wrong. One well known example is the trisomy
of chromosome 21, where there are three chromosomes
instead of two, more commonly known as the
Down syndrome. Even though it might be considered
as a mistake, the people with this syndrome
are often seen as the happiest humans.
Besides mistakes that happen during the formation
of a new organism, when growing up your body
has to constantly fix mistakes that are present
in the DNA, caused by for example UV. DNA
repair is a complex process, but sometimes
mistakes are not repaired and will lead to
a disease we have all heard of….which is
cancer. A promising technique that is even
being tested already in human beings, is Clustered
Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
or in short CRISPR. The most commonly known
system of CRISPR is CRISPR Cas9, where the
Cas9 is a nuclease that is able to cut the
DNA at a specific place. In this way the target
can be modified by deleting the gene, creating
point mutations or better known as SNPs or
to insert a piece of DNA with the help of
a template to for example fix a gene. I believe
that CRISPR can be seen as a powerful tool,
because genes that are broken can be specifically
targeted and fixed. Nevertheless, there is
still a road to walk on for improvement. As
you maybe can imagine is that some people
might think people will play God by altering
the DNA in humans or other organisms. So if
you were having a nasty disease would you
say yeah or nah for this new upcoming technique
for gene editing?
In addition to curing diseases directly, CRISPR
could be used to modify existing medical treatments
or medicines. One example is bacteriophages,
but that is another story. Nevertheless if
you are interested in bacteriophages go to
the channel of Soliloquy. He will explain
a lot of things about it.
