Tag: dna

Scientists Are Developing CRISPR Gene-editing Tools to Cure Inherited Diseases — But There’s a Catch

CRISPR-based gene-editing tools are being developed to correct specific defective sections of the genome to cure inherited genetic diseases, with some applications already in clinical trials.

However, there is a catch: under certain conditions, the repair can lead to large-scale deletions and rearrangements of DNA — as in the case of targeting the NCF1 gene in chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). This was reported by a team of researchers and physicians from the ImmuGene clinical research program at the University of Zurich.

Their findings have important implications not just for gene editing-based therapy, but also for CRISPR-mediated gene editing of animals and plants, where the same types of large-scale genetic damage could be triggered.

Indeed, because such editing is carried out with much less caution in non-human organisms, the likelihood of such large-scale damage occurring is hugely increased (see below on multiplexing).

The study also shows that attempts to avoid these problems by using adaptations of CRISPR gene editing technologies, such as prime and base editing, may not succeed.

This research on CGD is also only the latest in a series of studies that have repeatedly shown that different types of unintended mutations resulting from gene editing can affect the functioning of multiple gene systems, with potentially damaging consequences.

What is CGD?

CGD is a rare hereditary disease that affects about one in 120,000 people. The disease impairs the component of the immune system responsible for fighting off infections, which can be life-threatening to the patient.

One variant of CGD is caused by the absence of two letters in the DNA base unit gene sequence which codes for the NCF1 protein. This error results in the inability of blood cells known as neutrophils to produce an enzyme complex that plays an essential role in the immune defense against bacterial, yeast, and fungal infections.

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Operation Warp Speed official questions COVID vaccine purity, worries ‘they may ingrate’ into DNA

COVID-19 vaccine supporters are fond of sneering at public figures who have called for the Food and Drug Administration to pull or at least re-evaluate the safety of the increasingly unpopular therapeutics, such as Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cardiologist Peter McCullough and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

They might have a harder time caricaturing a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who ran the agency when COVID vaccines were being developed, promoted vaccination and repeat boosting as recently as 2022 and promoted cloth face masks as “one of the most powerful weapons we have” against COVID, before vaccines were available.

Robert Redfield cited “concerns that the mRNA vaccines actually have contaminating nucleic acid in them” but also sequences from Simian Virus 40, “which is a tumor virus,” in the debut episode of songwriter, author and Lyme Disease activist Dana Parish’s podcast.

Some of the 98 million polio vaccines given from 1955 to 1963 contained SV 40, which is part of the same family as the human papillomavirus associated with cervical cancer, according to the federally convened Immunization Safety Review Committee’s 2002 review of the evidence for the contamination’s effect on cancer rates.

The review was inconclusive on whether “SV40-contaminated polio vaccine did or did not cause cancer in the vaccine recipients” but affirmed that exposure concerns are “significant because of the seriousness of cancers as the possible adverse health outcomes and because of the continuing need to ensure and protect public trust in the nation’s immunization program.”

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Bacterial DNA a major worry in Jabs

We know about the species of Bacteria used in filthy toxic soups in the production mRNA Jabs, but it appears some people are confused about the extremely high risk of Bacterial DNA contamination in the vile vials and how that varies Lot to Lot.2

Imagine you are swimming inside a vat when they add Sodium Hydroxide to make the live bacteria spill their guts to yield the desired circular Plasmid double stranded DNA. You need to think of the Bacterial DNA which is rolled up into a tight little Nucleoid ball creating delight for topologists plus all the other toxins liberated.3

How effective is the filtration? We know Bacterial DNA is “nicked” by the alkali and even mechanical handling. What tests have been done by Regulatory Authorities.

Have all test results been redacted?

How much Bacterial DNA has been found by indepedent labs?

When BioNTech applied for Emergency Use Authorization in 2020, the scientists assessing the Process 2 Poojabs5 were clearly aware of the risk from Bacterial Host Cell Genomic DNA “impurities”.

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FDA Brushed Off Concerns About DNA Fragments in Gardasil’s HPV Vaccine

Over the last two years, cancer genomic experts have raised concerns about the presence of residual DNA fragments in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, saying that it has the potential to increase the risk of developing cancer.

This mirrors the concerns raised several years ago about the safety of the Gardasil human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, manufactured by Merck & Co.

In 2011, Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist and 30-year veteran in DNA analysis, made the startling discovery of synthetic DNA fragments in several vials.

“I was shocked to find DNA fragments in the HPV vaccine because DNA is not supposed to be there,” Lee recalls.

“They use DNA to make the vaccine, but then it is supposed to be chopped up and removed in the manufacturing process,” he said.

Lee, an internationally recognized expert in molecular gene detection, carefully documented his findings in a report that was sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for review.

The FDA investigated.

On Sept. 23, 2011, the FDA’s Center for Biological Evaluation and Research (CEBR) responded by saying it had evaluated the concerns in Lee’s report, and determined that the Gardasil vaccine was “safe and effective.”

The FDA did acknowledge that Lee found residual DNA in the vaccine, but said it was “expected” and “inevitable” in products that are manufactured using recombinant technology.

The agency also said it remained confident that the residual DNA was “not a risk to vaccine recipients.”

“The presence of residual DNA is not a safety factor as defined by US regulations, and is not required to be included in Gardasil’s labeling,” wrote the FDA.

The following month (Oct. 21, 2011) the FDA quietly updated its website to reflect the presence of DNA fragments in the vaccine, assuring the public there was “no safety risk.”

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Hardy, Radiation-Resistant Organism Could Rewrite Your Genetic Code to Cure High Cholesterol

Scientists are programming one of the world’s hardiest, most radiation-resistant organisms to rewrite a specific gene, allowing them to cure a common type of inherited high cholesterol. Dubbed TnpB and originating from the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, this exceptionally robust microbe also survives cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, making it an ideal tool for genetic editing.

Although the team has only tested its “genetic scissors” on mice models with an inherited predisposition to a type of high cholesterol called hypercholesterolemia, which currently affects 31 million Americans, the researchers believe their approach will one day allow them to cure high cholesterol in humans by essentially rewiring their genetic code.

Reprogramming TnpB to Cure High Cholesterol

In the published study outlining the new genetic reprogramming approach, the researchers note that genetic editing has shown significant promise in editing certain inherited health conditions by essentially “reprogramming” specialized bacteria to genetically edit the faulty gene in a person’s genetic code with a properly functioning one. However, the process, made famous by the CRISPR gene editing tool, has resulted in mixed successes.

One of the primary limiting factors of the CRISPR-Cas organism most commonly used in genetic editing is its size. According to the study authors, the microbe is too large to be precisely targeted, which “creates challenges when trying to deliver them to the right cells in the body.”

More recently, researchers in genetic editing have begun to focus on the organism’s “evolutionary progenitors,” some of which are much smaller than the CRISPR-Cas microbe. Among the most promising is TnpB, whose smaller size and hardiness offer scientists a new path for genetic editing.

These smaller progenitors are less efficient at reprogramming and show limited targeting ability due to their limited recognition requirements when binding DNA than the larger CRISPR-Cas microbes. Now, the researchers behind this study say they may have finally overcome that limitation, resulting in a much more efficient method of targeting TnpB to cure high cholesterol.

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Whistleblowers Reveal Homeland Security’s Sinister Plot to Drive Them to Suicide for Exposing Border Agency’s Federal DNA Collection Failures

In a bombshell revelation, whistleblowers within Homeland Security have accused the agency of actively retaliating against them for exposing a systemic failure to comply with a federal DNA collection law.

The whistleblowers have risked their careers to reveal that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of DHS, has systematically failed to collect the DNA of illegal immigrants as mandated by the DNA Fingerprint Act. This law, passed in 2005 with bipartisan support, mandates the collection of DNA samples from non-U.S. persons detained for immigration violations.

This failure has allowed violent criminals to evade detection and commit further crimes on American soil.

In an exclusive interview with Catherine Herridge, the whistleblowers detailed a chilling campaign of retaliation, including demotions, the stripping of law enforcement credentials, and the creation of a hostile work environment. According to the whistleblowers, the agency’s intent was clear: to silence them at any cost.

The whistleblowers, who collectively have over seven decades of law enforcement experience and held TOP SECRET clearances—Mark Jones (20 years), Fred Wynn (18 years), and Michael Taylor (31 years)—assert that the agency’s non-compliance has directly endangered American lives.

In their letter to the DHS Inspector General, they stated that out of nearly 1.7 million encounters with illegal immigrants in FY 2022, only about 37% resulted in DNA collection. Alarmingly, this figure dropped to just over 31% in Q2 FY23.

‘Gene Scissors’ Technology Causes Unintended Changes in Chromosomes

A recently published study in Nature Genetics shows that the use of CRISPR/Cas “gene scissors” causes unintended genetic changes that are different from random mutations.

According to the study, major structural changes in chromosomes occur much more frequently in the genomic regions targeted by the “gene scissors” than would otherwise be the case.

These results also have implications for the risk assessment of plants obtained from new genetic engineering, TestBiotech reported.

According to the European Union Commission and the European Food Safety Authority, unintentional genetic changes resulting from the use of CRISPR/Cas “gene scissors” are no different from random mutations.

However, a new method of data evaluation shows that this assumption is wrong.

The use of CRISPR/Cas completely interrupts the double DNA strand, thus causing some of the chromosomes to be temporarily separated from the main section.

In the separated (distal) section, the chromosomes can restructure and larger sequences of DNA can be lost (deletions), reversed (inversions) or inserted in the wrong place (insertions).

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Pesticides Designed to ‘Edit’ the Genes of Plants, Animals, Insects — and Humans?

We’re used to gene editing being something that’s done in controlled and contained conditions in the lab, with just the final product being unleashed in the environment.

But coming down the pipeline are pesticides designed to “edit” the genes of organisms out of doors, in the uncontrolled conditions of the open environment.

Applied by spraying, irrigation, or soil pellets, these outdoor-use genetic pesticides are claimed to be more environmentally friendly than chemical pesticides.

The problem is that these genetic pesticides could also “edit” the genes of what scientists call non-target organisms — i.e., people, animals and insects in the environment could become collateral damage.

“Editing” these organisms’ genes means silencing or disrupting their normal functioning.

And the deregulation of gene editing that is occurring and being aggressively promoted around the globe means that these products could be used in open fields with no prior risk assessment, traceability, or monitoring.

Sounding the alarm about this “Wild West” scenario is a new study by an international team of scientists.

The study, based on computer predictive modeling, found that exposure to a CRISPR/Cas gene-editing pesticide could unintentionally alter the genes of a wide assortment of non-target organisms, with potentially serious or even fatal consequences.

And leading the list of potential victims of unintended gene editing are humans.

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EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT HUMAN INTERACTIONS WITH INTELLIGENT “LOST” SPECIES OFFERS CLUES TO THEIR MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE

New investigations into humanity’s ancient interactions with an enigmatic “lost” species are revealing the complex world our early ancestors once shared.

The recent research conducted by an international team of geneticists and AI experts has revealed that the lives of early modern humans and Neanderthals were more interconnected than previously thought. Significantly, the study points to waves of interbreeding over time that fundamentally shaped the genetic makeup of modern humans and offers new insights into the mysterious disappearance of the Neanderthals.

Led by Joshua Akey from Princeton University, the team says it has discovered evidence of such genetic exchanges dating back as far as 250,000 years. This data challenges existing theories about human migrations in the ancient world and what factors may have steered human evolution over time.

The new findings point to a far deeper level of interaction that once occurred between ancient humans and our Neanderthal cousins.

THE NEANDERTHAL ENIGMA

First discovered in 1856, what eventually came to be recognized as the first known Neanderthal bones were found in a limestone quarry in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. The discovery introduced these mysterious archaic hominins to the paleoanthropological record and prompted serious scientific interest in what factors shaped human evolution over time.

Once mischaracterized as slow and lacking intelligence, mounting evidence of traits exhibited by Neanderthals, including advanced stone toolmaking and the possibility that they may have treated each other’s injuries, is continually reshaping our ideas about their intelligence levels.

While similar to us in many ways, the differences between Neanderthal remains and those of modern humans have long remained intriguing to scientists, raising questions that have deepened in recent years with the discovery of another hominin group, known as the Denisovans, that once also populated parts of Asia and South Asia as recently as the latter part of the last Ice Age.

Now, Akey and his team at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics are uncovering deeper insights than ever before into the genetic history modern humans share with the Neanderthals, who mysteriously vanished from the fossil record around 40,000 years ago.

According to Akey and his team, multiple different waves of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans appear to have taken place.

“We now know that for the vast majority of human history, we’ve had a history of contact between modern humans and Neanderthals,” Akey recently said.

Liming Li, a professor at Southeast University in China who was also a contributor to the study, called the team’s findings “the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture.”

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Out of Sight, ‘Dark Fungi’ Run the World from the Shadows

If you want to discover a hidden world of new life-forms, you don’t have to scour dark caves or slog through remote rainforests. Just look under your feet. When then-graduate student Anna Rosling went to northern Sweden to map the distribution of a particular root-loving fungus, she found something much more intriguing: Many of her root samples contained traces of DNA from unknown species. Weirder still, she never encountered a complete organism. When the field season ended, she had only isolated bits of raw genetic material. The fragments clearly belonged to the fungal kingdom, but they revealed little else. “I got obsessed,” recalls Rosling, now a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Since then mycologists have realized that such phantoms are everywhere. Point to a patch of dirt, a body of water, even the air you’re breathing, and odds are that it is teeming with mushrooms, molds and yeasts (or their spores) that no one has ever seen. In ocean trenches, Tibetan glaciers and all habitats between, researchers are routinely detecting DNA from obscure fungi. By sequencing the snippets, they can tell they’re dealing with new species, thousands of them, that are genetically distinct from any known to science. They just can’t match that DNA to tangible organisms growing out in the world.

These slippery beings are so widespread that scientists are calling them “dark fungi.” It’s a comparison to the equally elusive dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 percent of our universe and exert tremendous influence on, well, everything. Like those invisible entities, dark fungi are hidden movers and shakers. Scientists are convinced they perform the same vital functions as known fungi, directing the flow of energy through ecosystems as they break down organic matter and recycle nutrients. Dark fungi are prime examples of what biologist E. O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world.” But their cryptic lifestyle has made it a maddening challenge for scientists trying to show how exactly they run it.

Taxonomists have described just 150,000 of the millions of fungi predicted by global biodiversity estimates, and recent discoveries suggest a huge portion of what’s left may be off-limits to routine biological investigation. “We have not even started to scratch the surface,” says Henrik Nilsson, a mycologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “I’d be willing to bet that the clear majority will be dark.” Given the central place of fungi in the web of life that sustains us, experts argue we should get a better grasp on them.

Everything we know about dark fungi comes from environmental DNA, or eDNA. That term refers to strings of base pairs—the building blocks of DNA that are constantly sloughing off all living things. Researchers can analyze these free-floating bits of double helix to determine which species have been hanging around an area without seeing them. To identify fungi specifically, scientists look to a handy genetic marker called the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), which consists of several hundred base pairs that evolve quickly and thus help distinguish between species. Although the ITS is only a tiny fraction of the genome, researchers can single it out and amplify it with the same polymerase chain reaction technology used in COVID lab tests. If an ITS sequence is different enough from all others in genetic databases, it is thought to represent a new species, whether scientists lay eyes on its physical form or not.

At the turn of the millennium, eDNA sequencing burst onto the scene as a new way to discover species. Scientists suddenly found themselves awash in a “flood of data,” as David Hibbett, a mycologist at Clark University, and his colleagues wrote in 2009. That influx exposed the sheer vastness of dark fungi. Today, Hibbett says, “our understanding of the richness of fungal diversity is really being enlarged with these dark organisms.”

Every year researchers stumble on some 2,000 new fungi via the standard route, spotting them in nature or under a microscope. Yet a single eDNA study can register 10 times more dark fungi than that. As often as not, the fragments are among the most abundant DNA samples in their ecosystem. “I don’t think I ever saw an environmental sequencing study with less than 30 percent unknowns,” Nilsson says, and the ratio is typically much higher. Sometimes only a minority of DNA sequences can be classified at any meaningful taxonomic level, narrowing them from a kingdom (in this case, fungi) to a phylum and then to a class, and so on down to a species.

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