That's cool, but this is cooler. This guy is engineering mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria. Because these mosquitoes have a higher fitness than their wild type counterparts, they essentially outcompete malaria transmitting mosquitoes. Maybe it's a little technical, but still very cool.
What's interesting about this (I think) is that they're trying to open up research data that usually gets discarded or hidden. They're not necessarily talking about clinical trials of drugs in the FDA approval process. There's lots to be learned from the effects of drugs on various cell or tissue types at various stages of disease or age or any other variable of interest.
If a research group is studying the effects of compound A on some disease (atherosclerosis, for example), they might use a microarray study the effects of the changes in gene expression on endothelium. Maybe that compound turns out to be useless in this context, but they have data that might be meaningful on some other pathway like cell adhesion which is often implicated in cancer. That data would have been tossed because it was uninteresting to original question but could be meaningful to someone looking at something else.
But now you have two bits of information. Compound A doesn't effect atherosclerosis but it effects cell adhesion. And that tells us something about the wiring of the cell type in question. In their view, the interaction of genes forms a network and hitting one part of the network has an effect on cell adhesion but not atherosclerosis. So those pathways must not be directly linked. But compound A hits something in the cell adhesion subnetwork.
With a lot of little stories like this, you could build yourself a detailed idea of how different aspects of cellular machinery interact. And what targets are good to hit and what aren't.
The problem is because they will be changing payroll amounts for 200,000+ people at once. How do you identify which workers are affected? Schwarzenegger isn't even sure how many people's wages he's cutting. If you can't identify them, changing their pay isn't going to be any easier.
And you really don't want to make a mistake with payroll. LA Unified "upgraded" their payroll system recently and many teachers ended up paid twice or never paid at all, wreaking havoc across the school district. The University of California's payroll system is so byzantine that payroll administrators have a job for life.
Yeah this is politics, but doing things the right way (for once) or not at all is a good idea.
Actually, it is the DNA of four individuals that were sequenced. One of these, is purportedly Craig Venter, who led the Celera venture. For those of you who have watched GATTACA, you can imagine most people don't want it to be known whose DNA was sequenced.
To help answer some of the other questions I've seen thus far: Remember that the human genome was sequenced in a shotgun manner. We took the DNA of these individuals, fragmented the chromosomes randomly, and sequenced the fragments. At the beginning of all this, the sequencing machines (made by Celera) could only read about 200 base pairs at a time but this got better as the years went on. Still its not great. I believe a 1kb (one thousand base pairs) is the limit for a contiguous stretch of DNA using a sequencer. All of this was done with more than 12x coverage, so we repeated the procedure multiple times to get a better assembly.
Because the genome was randomly fragmented, we look for overlaps between ends of fragments to assemble "contigs" which are longer stretches of DNA. So it was completely possible to sequence the entire genome and not have an assembly. The assembly problem is non trivial because you have millions of fragments and need to order them with high confidence. Some of the confounding characterisitics of DNA include the varying length of overlaps between fragments, regions of the genome containing high number of simple repeats (ATATATATATA), and certain types of sequences occur in multiple places (such as gene promoter regions, binding sites for various transcription factors). But of course, there are many others that I can't think of.
Interestingly, when the sequencing was complete, it was the work of Jim Kent at UCSC that some say kept the sequence in the public domain. His work provided the first rough assembly of the genome at the same time HGSI and Celera were announcing completion of the sequencing. I'm not entirely sure about the public domain part, since I'm pretty sure you can't patent the entire genome in the US (goes against the Bill of Rights about owning another person).
In any case, the genome sequences are subjected to a build routine every now and then and while positions might shift, the relative order of genes and elements should remain the same. If you ever look at the UCSC database tables you will find pieces that can't be mapped to a unique location and stretches of DNA that differ among the individuals (haplotypes). The problem is complicated, but I think they've made good progress.
I met the Singaporean ambassador to the US about 2 years back during an event geared toward recruiting IT professionals to Singapore. Given its location in southeast Asia, Singapore is trying to build itself as a financial capital in the region. Along with that comes the infrastructure provided by technical know-how and IT skills. As a bonus, the national language is English. Housing, however, is hard to come by. All of this happened before the relatively recent financial crisis though.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cool, but
this is cooler. This guy is engineering mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria. Because these mosquitoes have a higher fitness than their wild type counterparts, they essentially outcompete malaria transmitting mosquitoes. Maybe it's a little technical, but still very cool.
What's interesting about this (I think) is that they're trying to open up research data that usually gets discarded or hidden. They're not necessarily talking about clinical trials of drugs in the FDA approval process. There's lots to be learned from the effects of drugs on various cell or tissue types at various stages of disease or age or any other variable of interest.
If a research group is studying the effects of compound A on some disease (atherosclerosis, for example), they might use a microarray study the effects of the changes in gene expression on endothelium. Maybe that compound turns out to be useless in this context, but they have data that might be meaningful on some other pathway like cell adhesion which is often implicated in cancer. That data would have been tossed because it was uninteresting to original question but could be meaningful to someone looking at something else.
But now you have two bits of information. Compound A doesn't effect atherosclerosis but it effects cell adhesion. And that tells us something about the wiring of the cell type in question. In their view, the interaction of genes forms a network and hitting one part of the network has an effect on cell adhesion but not atherosclerosis. So those pathways must not be directly linked. But compound A hits something in the cell adhesion subnetwork.
With a lot of little stories like this, you could build yourself a detailed idea of how different aspects of cellular machinery interact. And what targets are good to hit and what aren't.
The problem is because they will be changing payroll amounts for 200,000+ people at once. How do you identify which workers are affected? Schwarzenegger isn't even sure how many people's wages he's cutting. If you can't identify them, changing their pay isn't going to be any easier.
And you really don't want to make a mistake with payroll. LA Unified "upgraded" their payroll system recently and many teachers ended up paid twice or never paid at all, wreaking havoc across the school district. The University of California's payroll system is so byzantine that payroll administrators have a job for life.
Yeah this is politics, but doing things the right way (for once) or not at all is a good idea.
Actually, it is the DNA of four individuals that were sequenced. One of these, is purportedly Craig Venter, who led the Celera venture. For those of you who have watched GATTACA, you can imagine most people don't want it to be known whose DNA was sequenced.
To help answer some of the other questions I've seen thus far: Remember that the human genome was sequenced in a shotgun manner. We took the DNA of these individuals, fragmented the chromosomes randomly, and sequenced the fragments. At the beginning of all this, the sequencing machines (made by Celera) could only read about 200 base pairs at a time but this got better as the years went on. Still its not great. I believe a 1kb (one thousand base pairs) is the limit for a contiguous stretch of DNA using a sequencer. All of this was done with more than 12x coverage, so we repeated the procedure multiple times to get a better assembly.
Because the genome was randomly fragmented, we look for overlaps between ends of fragments to assemble "contigs" which are longer stretches of DNA. So it was completely possible to sequence the entire genome and not have an assembly. The assembly problem is non trivial because you have millions of fragments and need to order them with high confidence. Some of the confounding characterisitics of DNA include the varying length of overlaps between fragments, regions of the genome containing high number of simple repeats (ATATATATATA), and certain types of sequences occur in multiple places (such as gene promoter regions, binding sites for various transcription factors). But of course, there are many others that I can't think of.
Interestingly, when the sequencing was complete, it was the work of Jim Kent at UCSC that some say kept the sequence in the public domain. His work provided the first rough assembly of the genome at the same time HGSI and Celera were announcing completion of the sequencing. I'm not entirely sure about the public domain part, since I'm pretty sure you can't patent the entire genome in the US (goes against the Bill of Rights about owning another person).
In any case, the genome sequences are subjected to a build routine every now and then and while positions might shift, the relative order of genes and elements should remain the same. If you ever look at the UCSC database tables you will find pieces that can't be mapped to a unique location and stretches of DNA that differ among the individuals (haplotypes). The problem is complicated, but I think they've made good progress.
I met the Singaporean ambassador to the US about 2 years back during an event geared toward recruiting IT professionals to Singapore. Given its location in southeast Asia, Singapore is trying to build itself as a financial capital in the region. Along with that comes the infrastructure provided by technical know-how and IT skills. As a bonus, the national language is English. Housing, however, is hard to come by. All of this happened before the relatively recent financial crisis though.