If DNA were an essay and genes individual words, CRISPR would be the keyboard: adding, deleting and editing to create, for instance, drought-resistant crops.

PANAMA CITY Imagine a world where scientists could manipulate an organisms DNA with enough precision to reliably edit a single gene, creating drought-resistant crops or eliminating mosquitoes that carry malaria.

You actually dont have to imagine that hard. The technology already exists and this fall, it will be taught in lab courses at Gulf Coast State College (GCSC).

Biology professors and science teachers from Bay District Schools spent their day Tuesday learning about a cutting-edge gene manipulation called CRISPR clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats which essentially uses a particular bacterias immune system to edit DNA on the singular gene level. If DNA were an essay and genes individual words, CRISPR would be the keyboard: adding, deleting and editing.

Understandably, it has everyone in the biotechnology field talking.

CRISPR itself is causing a revolution in molecular biology, said Ben Stephenson, a former Arnold High graduate who, after graduating from GCSC and the University of Florida, returned to help teach his former professors this new method. There are medicines and all types of technologies with different applications that are coming about just because the system is so amenable to innovation.

In fact, the possibilities are so mind-boggling that even scientists like Stephenson havent considered them all. Almost any time Stephenson talks to someone about CRISPR, they inevitably come up with an idea or application he hasnt thought of.

Its a technology that gets people excited, he said. It will get kids excited.

Carrie Fioramonti, a natural sciences teacher at Gulf Coast who was participating in the workshop, said the faculty at the college already is brainstorming how they can incorporate CRISPR into their classes. Similar to when smartphones became more accessible and people became more interested in learning how to code, CRISPR, which is in a sense biological coding, has the potential to draw in people who arent trained in biology but are interested in the application. Do-it-yourself CRISPR starter kits already are available on Amazon for about $165, and Stephenson said bio-hacker clubs have sprung up in several major cities.

This is one of the hottest, fastest-growing fields of technology, Fioramonti said.

But as with many scientific fields that have exploded suddenly, regulations havent quite kept up. Gene editing comes with serious ethical implications, and while their samples were in the centrifuge, several of the participants in Tuesdays workshop chatted about experiments on embryos in Sweden and China using CRISPR to edit human genes. The experimentsdidnt go well, and CRISPR isnt quite understood well enough to use on humans yet, but the ethical implications are there.

Beyond the human question, there also is the question of whether such a precise gene-editing tool should be so widely available. According to the 2015 NY Magazine article The Crispr Quandary, the methods co-inventor, Jennifer Doudna, has questioned whether the technology should be available to students, as a minor mistake could have major implications, or a mutation might be accidentally introduced into the wild and affect a whole ecosystem.

While that concern is valid, Stephenson said the CRISPR kits, and anything being taught in a lab, would be fairly self-contained and largely harmless. The kits usually use an innocuous bacteria to test on, and on Tuesday, participants experimented with sea anemone DNA, adding a gene for fluorescence.

Many of the teachers at the workshop said they were amazed at how far biotechnology had come since they were in school, remembering when gene manipulation was a cumbersome, imprecise process. Even Stephenson, who just finished grad school, has to work to keep up, and he said most students now are starting college with a better understanding of CRISPR than he had after he graduated.

This is what our students are going to be going to school for, so we need to give them what they need, Fioramonti said of future labs using CRISPR.

Original post:

Gulf Coast State College looks to incorporate CRISPR into labs - The News Herald

Comments are closed.