DNA Editing in Mouse Embryos Prevents Disease
By Sara Reardon,
Nature News
| 04. 23. 2015
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
Mothers may one day be able to prevent their children from inheriting mitochondrial defects. Therapies that modify diseased eggs are inching closer to the clinic, but researchers are still hotly debating the safety and ethics of the most promising techniques. These involve combining the nucleus of the mother’s egg with mitochondria from a healthy woman to create a ‘three-parent embryo’.
In the 23 April issue of Cell1, one team proposes an alternative: neutralizing the faulty mitochondria. Some researchers say that the approach could help enable the ethically questionable practice of engineering human embryos to have modifications that would be passed on to future generations. (The first instance of such engineering was published in Protein & Cell2 and reported by Nature's news team on 22 April.)
About 1 in 5,000 people worldwide has a disorder caused by faulty mitochondria, the organelles that supply the cell with energy. In others, the faulty organelles worsen diseases that arise by other means, such as some cancers. Roughly 60–95% of the mitochondria in a cell must be faulty for disease...
Related Articles
By Russ Burlingame, Comicbook | 07.23.2024
Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences, a biotech company that's putting together plans to orchestrate the de-extinction for animals like the dodo and the wooly mammoth, made some waves on Reddit recently when they petitioned the United Federation of Planets -- the...
By Shelly Fan, Singularity Hub | 05.31.2024
We all know the drill for reproduction—sperm meets egg.
For the past decade, scientists have been pushing the boundaries of where the two halves come from. Thanks to induced pluripotent stem cell technology, it’s now possible to scrape skin cells...
By Alison Snyder, Axios | 06.06.2024
Gene editing's next chapter will be focused on tackling cancers and more common diseases, uncovering new details about aging and other fundamental aspects of biology and editing RNA, top scientists in the field said this week.
The big picture: ...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...