Imperfect Methods for Imperfect Democracies: Increasing Public Participation in Gene Editing Debates

Overview

Genome editing technologies allow scientists to modify an organism’s DNA via the addition, removal, or rearrangement of genetic material at specific genomic locations. These types of techniques could potentially be used to cure genetic disorders such as hemophilia and sickle cell anemia. One popular and widely used DNA-editing research tool that could lead to safe and effective cures for genetic disorders is the CRISPR-Cas9 system. CRISPR-Cas9 stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced...

Gene therapy is a technique where a gene is inserted into a person’s cells to prevent or treat a serious disease. The added gene may be a healthy version of the gene that is mutated in the patient, or it could be a different gene that inactivates or compensates for the patient’s disease-causing gene. For example, in patients with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) due to a mutation in the gene for the enzyme adenosine deaminase, a functioning version of the gene can be...

Bacteria and archaea are susceptible to viral infections just like eukaryotes; therefore, they have developed a unique adaptive immune system to protect themselves. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) are present in more than 45% of known bacteria and 90% of known archaea.
The CRISPR-Cas system stores a copy of foreign DNA in the host genome and uses it to identify the foreign DNA upon reinfection. CRISPR-Cas has three different...

While every living organism has a genome of some kind (be it RNA, or DNA), there is considerable variation in the sizes of these blueprints. One major factor that impacts genome size is whether the organism is prokaryotic or eukaryotic. In prokaryotes, the genome contains little to no non-coding sequence, such that genes are tightly clustered in groups or operons sequentially along the chromosome. Conversely, the genes in eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of non-coding sequence.

RNA editing is a post-transcriptional modification where a precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) nucleotide sequence is changed by base insertion, deletion, or modification. The extent of RNA editing varies from a few hundred bases, in mitochondrial DNA of trypanosomes, to a just single base, in nuclear genes of mammals. Even a single base change in the pre-mRNA can convert a codon for one amino acid into the codon for another amino acid or a stop codon. This type of re-coding can significantly affect the...