By Yaakov Saks
In Esports there are many different game modes a user can choose from – one of which being career mode. In career mode, a user gets to create a player and guide the player through his athletic career from rookie to retirement. Career mode starts with choosing the player’s physical features. A user gets to pick the player’s height, speed, and strength to design the perfect player. With today’s advanced gene editing technique CRISPR/Cas 9, are scientists able to play real life career mode and create the perfect sports player?
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) was first discover in 2002 by Spanish biologist Francisco Mojica and Dutch biologist Rudd Janssen when they found repeated clustered of non coding DNA in about 50 DNA base pairs interspersed throughout bacterial and archaeal genomes. Between these repeats were sequences of viruses that infect bacteria. CrRNA and tracrRNA encode near the CRISPR repeats and recruit the Cas 9 protein that is a DNA segment which cuts up the section of DNA. Scientists later realized they can combine crRNA and tractRNA into a single artificial guide RNA which allowed them to aim the DNA splicing enzyme at the sequence of their choice. CRISPR/Cas 9 is an enzyme that cuts up DNA which can be guided by programmed RNA, allowing for modification of specific DNA segments.
The ability to cut DNA at specific sequences causes the cell’s own DNA repair machinery to take effect. The repairing machinery can either glue the remaining pieces of DNA back together, creating a scar which disables the targeted gene, or it will copy a nearby piece of DNA to fill in the missing sequence. Scientists can provide their own DNA for the cell’s DNA repair machinery to copy those codons and insert them into the DNA. The ability to insert genes into the DNA at desired locations opens the door, allowing both helpful advancements in medicine and some ethically challenging opportunities.
The ability to cut and change the genome in precise locations has gotten researchers to consider attempting to cure HIV by cutting out the viral genes. This has already been demonstrated with T cells in laboratories. In addition, for agriculture, CRISPR may be a more ethically preferred way to modify organisms than the previous transferring of entire genes from one organism to another. Furthermore, researchers have created infertile mosquitoes in an attempt to prevent the spread of mosquito driven diseases by restricting mosquito reproduction.
You may be thinking, how can this affect humans? Can we really make a real life career mode? Theoretically, with this advancement, a parent would be able to choose certain features for their newborns, however, this poses a serious ethical challenge, and may potentially be dangerous. There have been researchers in China who have performed tests with human embryos and have found unexpected mutations such as off-target effects. From an ethics viewpoint, the concern is “that it may unintentionally change the genome forever.” So while real life career mode doesn’t seem to be in our near future, the science to do so is here, and in the meantime, it’s helping safely modify plants, cure diseases such as HIV, and create sterile mosquitoes.