Thursday, January 29. 2009First Commercially Cloned Dog Delivered to Florida FamilyBioArts International announced today (28.01.2009) that they have delivered the world’s first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named Lancey, to Florida residents Edgar and Nina Otto. “We can’t believe this day is finally here,” said Nina Otto, “We are so happy to have little Lancey in our family. His predecessor was a very special dog. We are thrilled beyond words!” Lancey was hand delivered to the Ottos on Monday, January 26th by BioArts Chairman Lou Hawthorne. “This is a very special milestone for our company – and great fun for me too,” said Hawthorne, who delivered Lancey personally. The Ottos were one of five families to bid and win an auction held by BioArts International in July for a chance to clone their family dog. Lancey’s genetic donor, Sir Lancelot, died in January, 2008, and the Ottos had his DNA stored. By October, samples from the original dog were on their way to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul, South Korea, which provides cloning services to BioArts. Lancey was born on November 18th, 2008, and brought to the US on January 25th, 2009 after being weaned from his surrogate mother. The Ottos, longtime residents of Boca Raton, have had many beloved dogs over the years, but Lancey’s genetic donor was unique. “Sir Lancelot was the most human of any dog we’ve ever had,” said Otto, “He was a prince among dogs.” Said Hawthorne, “One minute with Lancey and you know he’s special. He’s both extremely aware and very sweet. The Ottos are the first of six current clients to receive their clone. The next 6 months will be very exciting both for our clients and our staff.” Additional information about the Best Friends Again program and dog cloning is available at www.bestfriendsagain.com. More information about BioArts is available at www.bioarts.com. BioArts International is a biotech company focused on unique, untapped markets in the global companion animal, stem cell and human genomics industries. The Best Friends Again program is a collaboration between BioArts and the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea, home to the best and most experienced dog cloning team in the world. BioArts has been granted the sole, worldwide license for the cloning of dogs, cats and endangered species. The license was granted by Start Licensing, Inc. and applies to the somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) cloning patents developed at the Roslin Institute for the cloning of Dolly the sheep. Related Links:
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Monday, January 12. 2009Baby Screened to be Cancer Gene FreeAn event making headlines in Britain is already happening under the radar in the US.
Friday, January 09, 2009
By Emily Singer
The first baby in Britain to have been screened as an embryo for a genetic variation, called BRCA1, which greatly raises risk of breast cancer, has been born, according to recent news report. Because several members of the infant's father's family had been diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age, the parents decided to undergo IVF and screen their embryos for the mutation before implanting them. The decision was a controversial one, raising arguments that this type of screening is one step on a slippery slope towards eugenics. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, as the procedure is called, has traditionally been limited to genetic disorders known to be fatal. But as the number of known disease-linked genes grows, so do the options for testing. BRCA1 raises a women's risk of developing breast cancer to about 80 percent, but does not guarantee that she will develop the disease. The event has garnered extensive press in the UK, where in vitro fertilization is highly regulated; the governing body that oversees fertility only recently voted to allow this kind of screening. But in the US, where reproductive technologies are largely unregulated, such cases may already be occurring regularly. A fertility specialist I spoke with for a review published in the March 2007 issue of TR, said his lab had tested embryos for more than 150 diseases or risk genes, including the BRCA1 variant. Little data exists on the rates of this type of testing in the U.S., one of the few developed countries with so little regulation. Sex-selection, for example, is not outlawed, though most fertility clinics say they consider it ethically questionable and decline such requests. Any disease or trait for which a genetic risk factor has been identified--one that predicts athletic prowess, for example--could theoretically be screened for, and the number is growing daily. ----- Personal comment: Il s'agit cetainement d'un cap important en terme d'éthique (qui semble largement "outdated" aux Etats-Unis selon l'article). On entre dans une sorte de manufacture (architecture) humaine "in vitro" dans laquelle on choisirait la configuration de son embryon. Evidemment, pourquoi s'en passer si l'on peiut éviter un cancer à ses enfants... Mais on voit très bien les implications de telles décisions et processus ainsi surtout que les choix possibles qui suivront (taille, couleurs des yeux, intelligence, etc.) Tuesday, November 18. 2008Genetic GeographyGenomic analysis reveals Europeans' places of origin. - An international group of scientists has shown that genetic analysis can pinpoint Europeans' geographic origins within a few hundred kilometers. The scientists mathematically mapped the differences between people's genomes onto a two-dimensional grid, and the result looked much like a map of Europe. John Novembre, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who participated in the study, says that the findings could have research implications. Scientists can study a disease by looking for genetic variations shared by people who suffer from it. But test subjects from different countries may have unrelated genetic variations that yield false positives. The same technique that produced the genetic map could filter out such regional differences, making it easier to home in on variations of interest. Blood will out: A mathematical operation maps (right) the most significant differences between the genomes of 1,387 Europeans onto a single axis (PC1). Performed again, the operation maps the most significant differences that the first iteration missed (PC2). The result--a 2-D map of genetic variation--looks remarkably like a map of Europe (left). ----- Via MIT Technology Review (magazine = password protected), with a comment and picture on Flickr. Related Links:Thursday, October 23. 2008Selectively Deleting MemoriesResearch in mice suggests that it might be possible to delete specific painful memories.
By Lauren Gravitz
For more than two decades, researchers have been studying the chemical--a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II--for its role in learning and memory consolidation. To better understand the protein, a few years ago, Joe Tsien, a neurobiologist at the Medical College of Georgia, in Athens, created a mouse in which he could activate or inhibit sensitivity to alpha-CaM kinase II. In the most recent results, Tsien found that when the mice recalled long-term memories while the protein was overexpressed in their brains, the combination appeared to selectively delete those memories. He and his collaborators first put the mice in a chamber where the animals heard a tone, then followed up the tone with a mild shock. The resulting associations: the chamber is a very bad place, and the tone foretells miserable things. Then, a month later--enough time to ensure that the mice's long-term memory had been consolidated--the researchers placed the animals in a totally different chamber, overexpressed the protein, and played the tone. The mice showed no fear of the shock-associated sound. But these same mice, when placed in the original shock chamber, showed a classic fear response. Tsien had, in effect, erased one part of the memory (the one associated with the tone recall) while leaving the other intact. "One thing that we're really intrigued by is that this is a selective erasure," Tsien says. "We know that erasure occurred very quickly, and was initiated by the recall itself." Tsien notes that while the current methods can't be translated into the clinical setting, the work does identify a potential therapeutic approach. "Our work demonstrates that it's feasible to inducibly, selectively erase a memory," he says. "The study is quite interesting from a number of points of view," says Mark Mayford, who studies the molecular basis of memory at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA. He notes that current treatments for memory "extinction" consist of very long-term therapy, in which patients are asked to recall fearful memories in safe situations, with the hope that the connection between the fear and the memory will gradually weaken. "But people are very interested in devising a way where you could come up with a drug to expedite a way to do that," he says. That kind of treatment could change a memory by scrambling things up just in the neurons that are active during the specific act of the specific recollection. "That would be a very powerful thing," Mayford says. But the puzzle is an incredibly complex one, and getting to that point will take a vast amount of additional research. "Human memory is so complicated, and we are just barely at the foot of the mountain," Tsien says. Copyright Technology Review 2008. Related Links:Personal comment: Cela rappelle évidemment la (science-)fiction du film de Michel Gondry (Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind -cf liens ci-dessus-) Friday, October 17. 2008Computing with RNA
By Duncan Graham-Rowe
Scientists in California have created molecular computers that are able to self-assemble out of strips of RNA within living cells. Eventually, such computers could be programmed to manipulate biological functions within the cell, executing different tasks under different conditions. One application could be smart drug delivery systems, says Christina Smolke, who carried out the research with Maung Nyan Win and whose results are published in the latest issue of Science. The use of biomolecules to perform computations was first demonstrated by the University of Southern California's Leonard Adleman in 1994, and the approach was later developed by Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. But according to Shapiro, "What this new work shows for the first time is the ability to detect the presence or absence of molecules within the cell." That opens up the possibility of computing devices that can respond to specific conditions within the cell, he says. For example, it may be possible to develop drug delivery systems that target cancer cells from within by sensing genes used to regulate cell growth and death. "You can program it to release the drug when the conditions are just right, at the right time and in the right place," Shapiro says. Smolke and Win's biocomputers are built from three main components--sensors, actuators, and transmitters--all of which are made up of RNA. The input sensors are made from aptamers, RNA molecules that behave a bit like antibodies, binding tightly to specific targets. Similarly, the output components, or actuators, are made of ribozymes, complex RNA molecules that have catalytic properties similar to those of enzymes. These two components are joined by yet another RNA molecule that serves as a transmitter, which is activated when a sensor molecule recognizes an input chemical and, in turn, triggers an actuator molecule. Smolke and Win designed their RNA computers to detect the drugs tetracycline and theophylline within yeast cells, producing a fluorescent protein as an output. By combining the RNA components in certain ways, the researchers showed that they can get them to behave like different types of logic gates--circuit elements common to any computer. For example, an AND gate produces an output only when its inputs detect the presence of both drugs, while a NOR gate produces an output only when neither drug is detected. But this is just a demonstration, Smolke says. "We're using these modular molecules that have a sort of plug-and-play capability," she says--meaning that they can be combined in a number of different ways. Different kinds of aptamers could potentially detect thousands of different metabolic or protein inputs. Smolke and Win produce their device by encoding RNA sequences into DNA and introducing it into the cell. "So the cell is making these devices," Smolke says. "RNA is actually a very programmable substrate." Indeed, the attractive thing about this approach is that the components of the device and the substrate holding them together are all made from RNA, says Friedrich Simmel, a bioelectronics researcher at the Technical University of Munich, in Germany. "This is something that we also would like to do," he says, for not only do such devices self-assemble, but they can also be produced on a single long strand of RNA, all at once. Smolke and Win have already found collaborators for possible animal studies, to see how biocomputers can be delivered to cells and used once they're there. Smolke also envisions a large-scale collaboration to create a huge library of sensors out of which these devices can be made. Copyright Technology Review 2008. Related Links:Thursday, August 14. 2008Rise of the rat-brained robotsAFTER buttoning up a lab coat, snapping on surgical gloves and spraying them with alcohol, I am deemed sanitary enough to view a robot's control system up close. Without such precautions, any fungal spores on my skin could infect it. "We've had that happen. They just stop working and die off," says Mark Hammond, the system's creator. This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other. As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen. It's these spontaneous electrical patterns that researchers at the University of Reading in the UK want to harness to control a robot. If they can do so reliably, by stimulating the neurons with signals from sensors on the robot and using the neurons' response to get the robots to respond, they hope to gain insights into how brains function. Such insights might help in the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. "We're trying to understand what is going on inside this brain material that could have direct implications for human health," says Kevin Warwick, Reading's head of cybernetics, who is running the project with Hammond and Ben Whalley, both neuroscientists. The team are far from alone in this aim. At a July conference on in-vitro recording technology in Reutlingen, Germany, teams from around the world presented projects on culturing brain material and plugging it into simulations and robots, or "animats" as they are known. To create the "brain", the neural cortex from a rat fetus is surgically removed and disassociating enzymes applied to it to disconnect the neurons from each other. The researchers then deposit a slim layer of these isolated neurons into a nutrient-rich medium on a bank of electrodes, where they start reconnecting. They do this by growing projections that reach out to touch the neighbouring neurons. "It's just fascinating that they do this," says Steve Potter of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who pioneered the field of neurally controlled animats. "Clearly brain cells have evolved to reconnect under almost any circumstance that doesn't kill them." After about five days, patterns of electrical activity can be detected as the neurons transmit signals around what has become a very dense mesh of axons and dendrites. The neurons seem to be randomly firing, producing pulses of voltage known as action potentials. Often, though, many or all of them will fire in unison, a phenomenon known as "bursting". There are various views on what these bursts are. Some see them as pathological activity - akin to what happens in epilepsy - while others see them as the neural network expressing a stored memory. "I interpret them as seizure-like behaviour," says Potter. "I think the bursting is a function of sensory deprivation." Like a creature with no limbs or senses, the cut-down brain is simply bursting out of boredom, says Whalley. "With no structured sensory input the hypothesis is that you get arbitrarily random and quite often detrimental activity because all these cells are asking for some kind of direction." To test this notion, Potter's team "sprinkled" pulses of electricity across a number of contacts on the multi-electrode array (MEA), to simulate sensory inputs, and managed to significantly quell bursting activity. "It seems that sensory input is setting the background level of activity inside the brain," says Potter. These results have encouraged the researchers to begin investigating disease pathology with robots controlled by the cortical cultures. If they can make a robot do something repeatedly by sending signals to the culture, and then alter the brain chemically, electrically or physically to upset this controllability, they hope to be able to work out some causes and effects that throw light on disorders such as Alzheimer's. To do this, Whalley's colleagues Dimitris Xydas and Julia Downes started by connecting a culture to an ultrasound sensor in a wheeled robot. They then record the spikes of voltage produced at points within the culture when signals from the sensor are sent to it. When they find an area that fires consistently when the sensor input reaches it, those signals can be picked up by an electrode and used to, say, make the robot avoid an obstruction. For example, if the ultrasound sensor indicates "wall dead ahead" with a 1 volt signal, and a certain knot of neurons in the culture always generates a 100-microvolt action potential when that happens, the latter signal can be used to make the robot steer right or left to avoid the wall. To do this, of course, they need to connect their brain culture to the robot. Because it is living material, it needs to be kept at body temperature, so the control system is placed in a temperature-controlled cabinet the size of a microwave oven and communicates with the robot over a Bluetooth radio link. The robot then whirrs around a wooden corral, and in about 80 per cent of its interactions with the walls manages to successfully avoid them. The researchers now plan to plot neural connections before and after such extended journeys to see if the connections are strengthening, says Downes. At Georgia Tech, Potter has achieved similar results, getting his mobile robot to avoid obstacles 90 per cent of the time. He is hoping the research will help doctors to find ways to retrain or bypass malfunctioning neuronal circuits in people with epilepsy, and he is also starting work on Alzheimer's. The first step towards this, though, is to find a way to train the neurons into a more permanent state of reacting to sensor inputs at the right times. In a paper to be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, Potter describes a novel training system for these mini brains. What he has found is that a sequence of electric pulses applied to up to six electrodes on an MEA act as a kind of "mode switch" for the culture, changing its behaviour from being good at, say, steering a robot in a straight line to manoeuvring to avoid an obstacle. But because all cultures are different, he doesn't know which pulse sequences will work best for each of them. So he randomly generates 100 different sequences - called pattern training stimuli - for each culture and lets a computer work out which ones produce the best neural connections to make a virtual robot move in a desired direction. "
" After the selected stimuli have been applied a few times, certain behaviours become embedded in the culture for some hours. In other words, the culture has been taught what to do. "It's like training an animal to do something by gradual increments," Potter says. The Reading team are now planning to study whether particular parts of the culture, rather than all of it, can be more useful for performing certain tasks. They also plan to study whether the culture should be embodied in a robot early on. At the moment, they wait three to five weeks until a culture is mature before applying any sensory input. This might amount to trying to get a sensory-deprived "insane" culture to learn, says Whalley. This work will hopefully contribute to our knowledge of how brains work, but its potential should not be exaggerated, says Potter. "This system is a model. Everything it does is merely similar to what goes on in a brain, it's not really the same thing. We can learn about the brain - but it may mislead us." Warwick agrees, but believes it will be useful. "If this kind of work can make a 1 per cent difference to the life of an Alzheimer's patient it will be worth it," he says.
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