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Advances in biotechnology are transforming food production with fungi playing a pivotal role. Research led by Vayu Hill-Maini utilizes genetic engineering to enhance fungi’s natural properties, creating nutritious and sustainable meat alternatives. This approach not only opens new avenues in food science but also integrates sophisticated culinary applications. A gene-edited fungal culture from Vayu Hill-Maini’s research, seen on a dinner plate. Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future. With animal-free dairy products and convincing vegetarian meat substitutes already on the market, it’s easy to see how biotechnology can change the food industry....

ACRISPR treatment for hereditary angioedema has just performed incredibly well in its first human trial. If the results are confirmed in larger studies, it could be the first one-and-done therapy for the painful swelling disorder. The disease: Hereditary angioedema is a rare but serious disorder that causes severe swelling in the hands, feet, face, and other parts of the body. Sometimes, these attacks can be caused by stress or physical trauma, but they often happen for no apparent reason. If untreated, it’s common for someone with hereditary angioedema to have three or more attacks every month. The attacks can last...

NZ data shows up to 20% higher mortality for males that declines after each shot. How can there be such a large dose dependency if the shot is safe? We've always known that the Pfizer COVID vaccine kills disproportionately more males than females. Thanks to Barry Young, we can now confirm this effect in the NZ data. I’ve known for a long time that the Pfizer COVID vaccine kills disproportionately more males than females. Females are disproportionately injured, but males disproportionately die. This post covers two different effects: 1) an effect whereby males die at a higher rate than females...

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the world's first medicine employing CRISPR gene-editing technology to treat sickle cell disease, giving thousands new hope to treat the painful disease. "Sickle cell disease is a rare, debilitating and life-threatening blood disorder with significant unmet need, and we are excited to advance the field especially for individuals whose lives have been severely disrupted by the disease by approving two cell-based gene therapies today," said Nicole Verdun, director of the Office of Therapeutic Products within the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Two new treatments, Casgevy and Lyfgenia, were approved on Friday...

Anewly discovered “anti-CRISPR” system in viruses could help us control CRISPR gene-editing technologies and lead to better weapons against antibiotic-resistant superbugs. The background: Your immune system has ways to remember viruses you’ve encountered before and help defend you if they appear again — and, amazingly, some single-celled bacteria do, too. These microbes evolved the CRISPR system to protect themselves from the viruses that infect bacteria, called phages. The bacteria will take a little bit of a virus’ DNA sequence and add it to their own genome, like a memory of past infections. They then create CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins containing copies...

* One of the latest GMO Frankenfoods is Piggy Sooy, a soybean genetically engineered to contain pig protein. One or more undisclosed pig genes are spliced into conventional soya to create a soybean with 26.6% animal protein * Moolec, the U.K.-based company that developed Piggy Sooy, is also working on developing a pea plant that produces beef protein. The company claims these transgenic hybrids will provide similar taste, texture and nutritional value as meat, without the high cost of cultured or lab-grown meat alternatives * June 21, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture authorized the sale of cell-cultivated chicken from...

A CRISPR-alternative has been used to create eggs that are unlikely to trigger allergic reactions. That’s a potentially big deal for millions of children who are allergic to eggs — not just for their diets but also for their immune systems. The challenge: Allergic reactions are caused by the immune system mistaking something usually benign, like peanuts or pollen, for a harmful invader. Depending on the severity of the allergy, this can lead to anything from a mild rash to life-threatening anaphylaxis. Eggs are a pretty common allergy, with up to 2% of children experiencing a reaction to them. Most...

Genetically-altered pigs are now on the menu. The United States Food and Drug Administration has authorized gene-edited pigs entrance into the food chain for human consumption—as German-style sausages. Gene-editing can make changes in an organism’s DNA that could occur in nature or through selective breeding but would take much longer without a tool like CRISPR. The FDA authorization is investigational, and limited to these particular pigs, but shows that gene-editing livestock to quickly produce desirable traits for improved food production is a viable strategy for helping feed the planet’s growing population. “It’s important for a university to set the precedent...

In late 2021, Elon Musk tweeted his fears about the end of humanity. “We should be much more worried about population collapse….If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars,” he opined. Musk’s statements brought the world’s falling birthrate to the forefront of social consciousness. For nearly a century, fertility rates have been decreasing globally. The result is what scientists are describing as a “worldwide infertility crisis.” But there’s a solution looming on the horizon — artificial wombs. In 2017, scientists created a “BioBag” that functioned as an artificial womb, and they used it...

Past studies have used the gene-editing technology CRISPR to remove genes from immune system cells to make them better at fighting cancer. Now, PACT Pharma and UCLA have used CRISPR to remove and add genes to these cells to help them recognize a patient’s specific tumor cells. “It is probably the most complicated therapy ever attempted in the clinic,” study co-author Antoni Ribas told Nature. “We’re trying to make an army out of a patient’s own T cells.” T cells are our immune systems’ built-in defense against cancer. Natural cancer killers: Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells....

It will be the first time wheat created using a gene editing technique known as CRISPR has been grown in fields in the UK or Europe, although it is in use in China and the US. He said acrylamide has been a very serious problem for food manufacturers since it was first discovered in 2002, shown to cause cancer in rodents, and has been considered 'probably carcinogenic' for humans. 'It occurs in bread and increases substantially when the bread is toasted, but is also present in other wheat products and many crop-derived foods that are fried, baked, roasted or toasted,...

ntil recently, CRISPR—the gene-editing technology that won scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry—sounded more like science fiction than medicine; lab-created molecular scissors are used to snip out problematic DNA sections in a patient’s cells to cure them of disease. But soon we could see regulators approve the very first treatment using this gene-editing technology in an effort to combat rare inherited blood disorders that affect millions across the globe. In a $900 million collaboration, rare disease specialist Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics developed the therapy, dubbed exa-cel (short for exagamglogene autotemcel). It has already amassed...

Researchers at Georgia State University may have published the scientific understatement of the year when saying that their CRISPR experiment with hamsters “found that the biology behind social behavior may be more complex than previously thought.” Using the revolutionary gene editing tech, the GSU neuroscience team discovered that knocking out a receptor of vasopressin — a hormone associated with aggression, communication, and social bonding in both humans and hamsters — instead seemed to supercharge the cute rodents’ worst instincts. The GSU team was surprised to find that their attempts to turn down the aggression in the gene-hacked hamsters made them...

A new paper explores how gene-editing technology could be used to bring a species back, but even its authors have concerns about what that could mean. If Tom Gilbert could bring any extinct animal back to life, he said, it wouldn't be dinosaurs or woolly mammoths or any other megafauna that once roamed the planet. His is a humbler choice: the Christmas Island rat, a species that was wiped out from its island home in the Indian Ocean more than a century ago. Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, admitted that his pick may not be...

Pope Francis appointed Dr Jennifer Doudna to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Wednesday. The Holy Father has appointed the distinguished Professor Jennifer Anne Doudna as ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Professor Jennifer Doudna was born on 19 February 1964 in Washington, D.C. (USA). She studied biochemistry at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and earned her doctorate in Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge. Later, she continued her studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder.She is currently Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and...

CRISPR-Cas9 editing involves cutting DNA strands, leading to permanent changes to the cell's genetic material. ...uses a DNA-cutting protein called Cas9 found in bacterial immune systems. The system can be targeted to specific genes in human cells using a single guide RNA, where the Cas9 proteins create tiny breaks in the DNA strand. Then the cell's existing repair machinery patches up the holes. That's where the researchers saw an opportunity for a different kind of gene editor—one that didn't alter the DNA sequences themselves, but changed the way they were read in the cell. Epigenetic gene silencing often works through...

“...A bug known as a whitefly received a gene from a plant, and that DNA influx... changed it... The bug has been causing massive damage to tomato, potato, and tobacco crops, as the new gene allowed it to evade protections that plants develop against these pests.... ...As far as we know, ours is the first example of horizontal transfer of a functional gene from plant to animal,”... ...horizontal gene transfer occurs when a species gets genetic code from another species and... incorporates those genes in its DNA. Genes are typically transmitted vertically, from parents to offspring, and don’t involve inter-species...

Moreover, Beijing may already be engineering "super soldiers." "U.S. intelligence shows that China has conducted human testing on members of the People's Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities," wrote then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, in a December 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "China Is National Security Threat No. 1." It is not clear how far Chinese military researchers have gone. They are, however, advocating use of the CRISPR gene-editing tool to enhance human capabilities, and the Communist Party's Central Military Commission is "supporting research in human performance enhancement and 'new concept' biotechnology."...

Scientists have tracked the lineages of cancer cells in the past by comparing shared mutations and other variations in their DNA blueprints. These methods...depend to a certain extent on there being enough naturally occurring mutations or other markers to accurately show relationships between cells. ... Instead of simply hoping that a cancer lineage contained enough lineage-specific markers to track, the researchers decided to use Chan’s method to add in markers themselves. “Basically, the idea is to engineer a cell that has a genomic scratchpad of DNA, that then can be ‘written’ on using CRISPR,” Weissman says. This ‘writing’ in the...

With an extraordinary new technology called CRISPR, we can now edit DNA—including human DNA. But how far should we go? Gene editing promises to eliminate certain genetic disorders like sickle cell disease. But the applications quickly raise ethical questions. Is it wrong to engineer soldiers to feel no pain, or to resurrect an extinct species? And is there harm in allowing parents to choose their child’s features, like eye color or height? The scientists who pioneered human genome studies and CRISPR grapple with these questions. (Premiered September 9, 2020)