Tag: dna

US company hoping to bring back the dodo and the mammoth – but here’s why it won’t be like Jurassic Park

The idea of scientists bringing pre-historic creatures back to life with some clever DNA trickery might sound familiar to fans of the 1993 Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic Park.

But for Colossal Biosciences – a company that hopes to reintroduce extinct species such as the dodo and the mammoth – it is more than just a film script.

It’s a reality – and one that could be just years away.

“We’ve got all the technology we need,” says Ben Lamm, chief executive of the firm, based in Dallas, Texas.

“It is just a focus of time and funding. But we are 100% confident [we can bring back] the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the mammoth.”

The science behind the project is simple: Work out the genes that make an extinct animal what it is, and then replicate those genes using the DNA of a close existing relative.

“It’s almost reverse Jurassic Park,” says Mr Lamm, speaking to Sky News.

“In the film, they were filling in the holes in the dinosaur DNA with frog DNA.

“We are leveraging artificial intelligence and other tools to identify the core genes that make a mammoth a mammoth and then engineering them into elephant genomes.”

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Genetic Analysis Bolsters Blackfoot People’s Land Claims

The advancement of DNA collection-and-analysis technology has had significant consequences for anthropology and archaeology, resulting in surprising revelations about genetic connections between modern populations and ancient peoples. In the latest example of this fascinating phenomenon, a team of genetic scientists, in collaboration with representatives of the indigenous Blackfoot nation, have just completed a study that establishes an unexpected relationship between modern Blackfoot people and some of the earliest inhabitants of the Americas.

“We show that the genomics of sampled individuals from the Blackfoot Confederacy belong to a previously undescribed ancient lineage that diverged from other genomic lineages in the Americas in Late Pleistocene times,” the scientists and their Native American colleagues wrote in an article published in the journal Science Advances. “Using multiple complementary forms of knowledge, we provide a scenario for Blackfoot population history that fits with oral tradition and provides a plausible model for the evolutionary process of the peopling of the Americas.”

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Scientists Put Tardigrade Proteins Into Human Cells. Here’s What Happened.

Freeze ’em, heat ’em, blast them into empty space; with survival skills unlike any other organism on the planet, those hardy critters known as tardigrades will only come back for more.

While it’s clear their ability to withstand stress is in part due to their ability to turn their insides into gel, the mechanisms behind this act of metabolic preservation haven’t yet been made clear.

A new study led by researchers from the University of Wyoming found that expressing key tardigrade proteins in human cells slowed metabolism, providing critical insights into how these virtually indestructible invertebrates can survive under the most extreme conditions.

The team focused on a particular protein called CAHS D, already known to protect against extreme drying (desiccation). Through a variety of methods, the researchers showed how CAHS D transformed into a gel-like state when under stress, keeping molecules protected and protecting against drying.

“This study provides insight into how tardigrades, and potentially other desiccation-tolerant organisms, survive drying by making use of biomolecular condensation,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Beyond stress tolerance, our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centered around the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability.”

Tardigrades have already shown they can survive hot and cold temperatures and high levels of radiation that would be fatal to human beings, and long periods without any water – normally so essential to life. They can even survive in space.

Previous research has revealed an impressive number of tricks that tardigrades use to stay alive, built up over hundreds of millions of years. Essentially, they’re very good at slowing the processes of life right down with the help of CAHS D, and that could be useful in human cells too.

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Three Pennsylvania men who have spent decades in prison for rape and murder of elderly woman in her home have their convictions overturned

Three Pennsylvania men who were imprisoned for decades in the 1997 slaying of a 70-year-old woman – despite their DNA never matching that found at the scene – have had their convictions overturned by a judge.

The Delaware County judge threw out the convictions for Derrick Chappell – who was 15 when he was arrested – and first cousins Morton Johnson and Sam Grasty. The District Attorney is now reviewing the case to see if a new trial is necessary.  

Chappel, Johnson, and Grasty were each convicted in separate trials for the murder of Henrietta Nickens, a 70 year old woman who was brutally killed at her home in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 10, 1997.

Nickens was savagely beaten and had had her underwear removed. Investigators found her home ransacked and blood on the walls and bedding. 

A mysterious green jacket, in the pocket of which was cocaine, was found on top of Nickens’ television set.

Investigators discovered semen in the woman’s rectum. They tested the semen and found that it didn’t belong to any of the three arrested individuals.

The prosecutors, who have been characterized as pugnacious, sought to separate the recovered semen from the crime. They affirmed that the semen might have originated from consensual intercourse and was unrelated to the murder. 

Nickens had been chronically ill and had no known sexual partners. 

The prosecution’s case against Chappel, Johnson, and Grastly hinged on the testimony of key witness Richard McElwee, who was 15 years old at the time of the crime.

McElwee testified that he functioned as a lookout while the three older boys pilfered Nickens of $30.

In exchange for his testimony, McElwee pled guilty to third-degree murder, as well as other charges. He was sentenced to serve six to 12 years in prison in 1999.

In 2000 and 2001, Chappel, Johnson, and Grasty were each convicted of second-degree murder, and they were sentenced to life in prison.

Over the course of their more than two decades-long prison stint, the three men have continued to protest their innocence.

Each of them filed pro se petitions in federal court over the years saying they were wrongly convicted, but their petitions were denied.

The fate of Chappel, Johnson, and Grasty drew the attention of many organizations dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted men and women.

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Scientists Close To Controlling All Genetic Material On Earth

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have developed a new method to create human artificial chromosomes (HACs) that could revolutionize gene therapy and other biotechnology applications. The study, published in Science, describes an approach that efficiently forms single-copy HACs, bypassing a common hurdle that has hindered progress in this field for decades.

Artificial chromosomes are lab-made structures designed to mimic the function of natural chromosomes, the packaged bundles of DNA found in the cells of humans and other organisms. These synthetic constructs have the potential to serve as vehicles for delivering therapeutic genes or as tools for studying chromosome biology. However, previous attempts to create HACs have been plagued by a major issue: the DNA segments used to build them often link together in unpredictable ways, forming long, tangled chains with rearranged sequences.

The Penn Medicine team, led by Dr. Ben Black, sought to overcome this challenge by completely overhauling the approach to HAC design and delivery. “The HAC we built is very attractive for eventual deployment in biotechnology applications, for instance, where large-scale genetic engineering of cells is desired,” Dr. Black explains in a media release. “A bonus is that they exist alongside natural chromosomes without having to alter the natural chromosomes in the cell.”

To test their idea, the scientists turned to a tried-and-true workhorse of molecular biology: yeast. They used a technique called transformation-associated recombination (TAR) cloning to assemble a whopping 750 kilobase DNA construct in yeast cells. For context, that’s about 25 times larger than the constructs used in previous HAC studies. The construct contained DNA from both human and bacterial sources, as well as sequences to help seed the formation of the centromere.

The next challenge was to deliver this hefty payload into human cells. The team accomplished this by fusing the engineered yeast cells with a human cell line, a process that had been optimized in previous studies. Remarkably, this fusion approach proved to be much more efficient than the traditional method of directly transferring naked DNA into cells.

The results were stunning. Not only did the engineered HACs form successfully, but they did so with much higher efficiency compared to standard methods. Furthermore, these designer chromosomes were able to replicate and segregate properly during cell division, a key requirement for their long-term stability and functionality.

“Instead of trying to inhibit multimerization, for example, we just bypassed the problem by increasing the size of the input DNA construct so that it naturally tended to remain in predictable single-copy form,” explained Dr. Black.

But the researchers didn’t stop there. They also devised a clever way to visualize the HACs in their native, uncompacted state. By gently lysing the cells and using a special centrifugation technique, they were able to isolate the HACs away from the rest of the cellular DNA. This allowed them to confirm that the HACs maintained their single-copy status and circular topology, without any unwanted rearrangements or additions.

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China Used COVID-19 PCR Tests to Acquire Millions of Americans’ DNA

Several bombshell US government and intelligence agency reports confirm that China used COVID-19 PCR tests to legally collect DNA from Americans and millions of adults and children across 180 countries.

On October 26, 2021, my son was administered a COVID-19 PCR test at his school without my consent. I immediately looked into the San Diego School District’s “COVID-19 testing program” and discovered that the NIH was funding the testing as a “research program” being conducted by GenBody, a South Korean diagnostics company in order to collect the DNA of American children and then transfer their genomic data to foreign nations. On October 27, 2021, on Stew Peters, I repeatedly stated that my son’s DNA was collected and transferred to a foreign nation as part of a NIH-funded foreign study under the farce of public health safety. View 5:20 – 8:15.

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Experts Discover Over 200Billion DNA Fragments in a Single Dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine

Dr. Phillip Buckhaults is a Professor at the University of South Carolina.  He has a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology and conducts cancer genomics research.  What that effectively means is he and his team are specialists at detecting foreign pieces of DNA in places where they are not supposed to be.

On 12 September, he testified before the South Carolina Senate Medical Affairs Ad-Hoc Committee on the Department of Health and Environmental Control (“DHEC”).

“The Pfizer vaccine is contaminated with plasmid DNA. It’s not just mRNA, it’s got bits of DNA in it.” Prof. Buckhaults said.

A colleague who was in charge of the vaccination programme in Columbia, South Carolina,  kept all the Pfizer vials, containing remnants of the contents, from the two batches that were used.  From the remnants, Prof. Buckhaults sequenced all the DNA that was in these vials. “I can see what’s in [the vaccines] and it’s surprising that there’s any DNA in there. And you can kind of work out what it is and how it got there and I’m kind of alarmed about the possible consequences of this both in terms of human health and biology,” he said.

“This DNA, in my view, it could be causing some of the rare, but serious, side effects like death from cardiac arrest.

“This DNA can and likely will integrate into the genomic DNA of cells that got transfected with the vaccine mix … we do this in the lab all the time; we take pieces of DNA, we mix them up with a lipid complex, like the Pfizer vaccine is in, we pour it onto cells and a lot of it gets into the cells.  And a lot of it gets into the DNA of those cells and it becomes a permanent fixture of the cell.  It’s not just a temporary thing.  It is in that cell from now on and all of its progeny from now on and forever more …  So, that’s why I’m kind of alarmed about this DNA being in the vaccine. It’s different from RNA because it can be permanent.”

Based on solid molecular biology, it is a theoretical but reasonable concern that this DNA could cause a sustained autoimmune attack towards that tissue, he said.

“It’s also a very real theoretical risk of future cancer in some people. Depending on where in the genome this foreign piece of DNA lands it can interrupt a tumour suppressor or activate an oncogene,” he added. “I think it’ll be rare but I think the risk is not zero.”

“DNA is a long-lived,” Prof. Buckhaults explained.  “What you were born with you’re going to die with and pass on to your kids. DNA lasts for hundreds of thousands of years … So, alterations to the DNA – they stick around.”

Prof. Buckhaults explained that there are a LOT of pieces of DNA in Pfizer’s vaccines.  Although some are 5,000 and 500 base pairs long, most of the pieces are around 100 base pairs. But this is irrelevant because the probability of a piece of DNA integrating into the human genome is unrelated to its size.  “Your genome risk is just a function of how many particles there are,” he said. “All these little pieces of DNA that are in the vaccine [give] many many thousands of opportunities to modify a cell of a vaccinated person.”

“The pieces are very small because during the process they chopped them up to try to make them go away – but they actually increased the hazard of genome modification in the process.”

Prof. Buckhaults’ team took all these little pieces of DNA and “glued them together” to try to establish its source.  After putting together 100,000 pieces of DNA they were able to establish it came from a plasmid that can be purchased online from Agilent, a Californian life sciences company which was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett Packard.

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Chinese Scientists Implant First Pig Liver Into Brain-Dead Human

Who says nothing interesting ever happens in the world anymore? This week, in a “first of its kind” operation, a brain-dead human subject was implanted with the world’s first gene-edited pig liver transplant, according to SCMP. 

In what could be a pioneering move, Chinese scientists have transplanted a gene-edited pig liver into a human, aiming to potentially mark a solution to organ shortages, the report says.

The liver was modified to reduce rejection risks and was implanted into a brain-dead recipient, showing no rejection signs four days post-operation, as per the Air Force Medical University. SCMP writes that this procedure could significantly aid those with end-stage liver disease, possibly revolutionizing liver transplants. 

Gene editing advancements in China also promise to enhance efficiency and accessibility in plant modification, reflecting broader strides in medical innovation, the report continues.

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A little bit of Pfizer in your cheese? Fake rennet bypassed additive approval process

Pfizer’s bioengineered rennet turns your milk into cheese
You may be surprised to learn that the cheese you are eating, if it’s not USDA organic, most likely contains synthetic rennet bioengineered by Pfizer. Often referred to as microbial rennet, the source of the rennet is not required to be listed on food labels, so most Americans have no idea that the food they are eating contains non-natural ingredients.

Pfizer’s bioengineered rennet turns your milk into cheese

You may be surprised to learn that the cheese you are eating, if it’s not USDA organic, most likely contains synthetic rennet bioengineered by Pfizer. Often referred to as microbial rennet, the source of the rennet is not required to be listed on food labels, so most Americans have no idea that the food they are eating contains non-natural ingredients.

Global Research‘s Dr. Ashley Armstrong, who believes that natural rennet is preferable to synthetic rennet, explained that cheese making involves just four ingredients — milk, salt, starter culture, and (traditionally) animal rennet. Rennet is used to curdle the cheese and separate the curds from the whey. Today, rennet comes from more than one source, the others being “vegetable rennet, microbial rennet, and a genetically modified version called FPC (fermentation-produced chymosin). Chymosin is one of the two enzymes found in natural animal rennet, the other being pepsin:

Animal rennet is usually 90% chymosin enzyme and 10% pepsin enzyme. The small amount of pepsin will break down the casein protein in milk in a slightly different way compared to just chymosin alone, producing a final product with an enhanced taste.

Supreme Court rules new life forms can be patented

The permissibility for manufacturers to make synthetic rennet resulted from a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that new life forms can be patented. As VRG’s (Vegetarian Resource Group) research director Jeanne Yacoubou, MS, explained, this became pivotal to the development of synthetic rennet FPC (fermentation produced chymosin) when animal rennet started rising in price as a result of the animal rights movement:

When calf rennet became scarce and unreliably available in the 1960s and 70s as the veal industry was declining due to the animal rights movement but demand for cheese increased, calf rennet became very expensive. Companies looked for a “rennet substitute.” Recombinant DNA technologies involving microbes were becoming popular and companies turned to it in the 1980s. [Emphases added.]

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Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts

An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.

Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, owns and operates the 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Vaughn, Montana where he started this operation in 2013, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Alternative livestock includes hybrids of mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other large mammals which are often used for trophy hunting by wealthy people.

An unnamed accomplice of Schubart kicked off the decade-long scheme by illegally bringing biological tissue from a Marco Polo sheep, the largest sheep in the world, from Kyrgyzstan into the U.S. in 2013, according to prosecutors.

How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over 5 feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and U.S. law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.

Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the U.S., he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.

“Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.

By the time Schubart had his Montana Mountain King he used the cloned sheep’s semen to artificially impregnate female sheep, creating hybrid animals. The goal, as the DOJ explains it, was to create these massive new sheep that could then be used for sports hunting on large ranches. Schubart also forged veterinarian inspection certificates to transport the new hybrid sheep under false pretenses, and sometimes even sold semen from his Montana Mountain King to other breeders in the U.S.

Schubart sent 15 artificially inseminated sheep to Minnesota in 2018 and sold 37 straws of Montana Mountain King’s semen to someone in Texas, according to an indictment filed last month. Schubart also offered to sell an offspring of the Montana Mountain King, dubbed the Montana Black Magic, to someone in Texas for $10,000.

Discussions between Schubart and an unnamed person apparently included what to call this new breed of sheep they were creating. The other person said another co-conspirator had suggested the name “Black Argali,” though noting “we can’t,” presumably because it would give away the fact that these sheep were descended from the argali species.

Schubart pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, and conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to acquire, transport or sell wildlife in contravention of federal law.

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