CRISPR-Cas9 is the cutting-edge genomic technology that essentially lets you target exact sequences in DNA and then cut into them like a knife and insert or remove a gene. You may remember it from that Chinese scientist who successfully (but controversially) implanted gene-edited embryos into a woman who then gave birth to live lab babies. More often, it's used to create things like malaria-resistant mosquitoes or mushrooms that don't brown as fast.

But it does have a lot of practical medical potential, too. It's already been used to remove HIV from a patient's genome. And now, after CRISPRing out a blindness-causing gene from mice, scientists have now successfully scaled-up this procedure to work in a live human body. From NPR:

In this new experiment, doctors at the Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Ore., injected (into the eye of a patient who is nearly blind from a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis) microscopic droplets carrying a harmless virus that had been engineered to deliver the instructions to manufacture the CRISPR gene-editing machinery.

[…]

The goal is that once the virus carrying the CRISPR instructions has been infused into the eye, the gene-editing tool will slice out the genetic defect that caused the blindness. That would, the researchers hope, restore production of a crucial protein and prevent the death of cells in the retina, as well as revive other cells — enabling patients to regain at least some vision.

[…]

The procedure, which takes about an hour to perform, involves making tiny incisions that enable access to the back of the eye.

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'Rule will require immigration officers to collect cheek swabs from what could amount to hundreds of thousands of people a year '

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, police say they collected DNA from the spot where a suspect face-planted into a door while trying to escape. Read the rest

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) this week released new rules that limit when police can access family tree DNA databases to identify crime suspects. This new genealogy policy is the first ever at the federal level to address how online genetic databases sold as services to the public can be used in law enforcement. Read the rest

America has an epidemic of untested rape kits, thanks to the institutional misogyny of police departments and prosecutors, especially when it comes to rapes committed against poor and racialized women. Read the rest

“The Chinese authorities turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.”

This is a heck of a story about how genetic surveillance, powered by American know-how, is being used to oppress the Muslim minority Uighur population and others in China, from the New York Times. Read the rest

Scientists analyzed almost a quarter million DNA samples in the UK Biobank and found 538 new genes that appear to have a role in intellectual capabilities. Read the rest

This is a truly heartwarming story.

As a way to find his father, a man in Hawaii took an Ancestry.com DNA test. He soon discovered he shared the same birth mother as someone else using the site: his best friend of 60 years.

Now in their 60s, Walter Macfarlane and Alan Robinson of Oahu recently learned that they are half-brothers. The men, both born and raised in Hawaii, are 15 months apart in age and used to play football together in high school. Macfarlane says that he and Robinson have been playing cribbage together all their lives.

KHON reports:

Macfarlane never knew his father, and Robinson was adopted.

With the help of his family, Macfarlane searched for answers over the years through the internet and social media with no luck so they turned to family DNA matching websites.

“So then we started digging into all the matches he started getting,” Cindy Macfarlane-Flores, Macfarlane’s daughter, explained.

At the top of the list of DNA matches was the username Robi737.

The results showed Macfarlane and robi737 had several matches in their DNA including identical X chromosomes.

Here’s where Robinson comes in.

“As a nickname everybody called him Robi and he flew 737s for Aloha Airlines, he was a pilot,” Macfarlane-Flores says.

It turns out Robinson had also used Ancestry.com to find answers about his family.

After a few phone calls back and forth, the men learned they shared the same birth mother.

“It was a shock,” Macfarlane said.

“Yea it was shock, definitely and then we thought about it and compared forearms,” Robinson said.

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Matthew Combs, a Fordham University Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station grad student worked with colleagues from Fordham and the Providence College Department of Biology to sequence the genomes of brown rats in Manhattan, and made a surprising discovery: the geography of rats has a genetic correlation, so a geneticist can tell where a rat was born and raised by analyzing its DNA. Read the rest

National Geographic interviewed geneticist Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes. "In many ways, genetics makes a mockery of race," he notes. Read the rest

Strawberries are delicious, but is DNA extracted from strawberries delicious? Chemist NileRed extracted some DNA using food safe ingredients, then dried it and tasted it so we don't have to. Read the rest

We are related?!

Yes, it's true. Watch U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and #LarryDavid find out they are related on tonight's Season 4 premiere of #FindingYourRoots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Watch the full episode: http://bit.ly/TheImpression

Posted by Finding Your Roots on Tuesday, October 3, 2017

In early 2016, comedian Larry David played beside Senator Bernie Sanders in an SNL skit. He also portrayed the Vermont politician in "Bern Your Enthusiasm," an SNL spoof of his own show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

David's performance was so spot-on that he received an Emmy award.

The pair learned earlier this year, by appearing on the PBS celebrity genealogy research show Finding Your Roots, that they are actually related. On Tuesday night, when the show's season four premiere aired, we got to see their reactions on learning that their DNA proves they are cousins.

Both Brooklyn natives were charmed by the news.

Sanders responded with a laugh, "You're kidding, oh my God! That's unbelievable." David remarked, "That is really funny. That is amazing. Alright, Cousin Bernie."

(Consequence of Sound) Read the rest

The field of epigenetics continues to make interesting discoveries about environmental effects on genetic material. A team led by Thomas McDade found that children's experiences affected their DNA, which in turn affected suscepitability to certain diseases. Via Smithsonian:

Their investigation followed more than 500 children in the Philippines and found that certain childhood situations can create modifications in genes associated with inflammation, which affects how prone we are to suffer from certain illnesses. Specifically, these factors included socioeconomic status, the prolonged absence of a parent, the duration of breastfeeding, birth during the dry season, and exposure to microbes in infancy.

This cohort comprised over 3,000 pregnant women recruited in the Philippines in 1983. These women came from all different walks of life: They differed in access to clean water or a roof over their heads, whether they lived in an urban or a rural area, and whether they came into frequent contact with animals. From the data, they looked at over 500 of those women in order to figure out if their child’s environment growing up led to epigenetic modifications to their DNA—and later to a change in inflammatory proteins in their blood in adulthood.

Once their children were born, the investigators kept track of them and of the environments they were exposed to throughout their lives. Once they turned 21, the investigators took a blood sample that they used to measure the DNA methylation throughout their genome, as well as inflammation-related proteins that have been previously associated with cardiovascular diseases and other aging-related diseases.

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In an astonishing step forward in biomolecular computing, Harvard researchers encoded a 19th century film clip in DNA and stored it inside living bacteria. Later, they sequenced the bacterium's genome and decoded the film. From IEEE Spectrum:

To get a movie into E. coli’s DNA, (neuroscientist Seth) Shipman and his colleagues had to disguise it. They converted the movie’s pixels into DNA’s four-letter code—molecules represented by the letters A,T,G and C—and synthesized that DNA. But instead of generating one long strand of code, they arranged it, along with other genetic elements, into short segments that looked like fragments of viral DNA.

E. coli is naturally programmed by its own DNA to grab errant pieces of viral DNA and store them in its own genome—a way of keeping a chronological record of invaders. So when the researchers introduced the pieces of movie-turned-synthetic DNA—disguised as viral DNA—E. coli’s molecular machinery grabbed them and filed them away.

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No wonder Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David did such a great job impersonating presidential candidate Bernie Sanders last year on Saturday Night Live. The two are apparently related, perhaps as distant cousins.

According to NBC News:

Sanders is a "third cousin or something," David told reporters at a Television Critics Association event on Wednesday. The comedian, who impersonated the senator on "Saturday Night Live" during the 2016 election, said he learned about the genealogical connection while filming an upcoming episode of the PBS series "Finding Your Roots."

"I was very happy about that," David said, according to Variety. "I thought there must have been some connection."

We're still waiting to see how Sanders feels about his new extended family member. Read the rest

British geneticist Adam Rutherford is one of the country's great science communicators, an alumnus of Nature whose work we've celebrated here for many years; with his second book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Rutherford reveals how the century's astounding advances in genetic science reveal just how little we understand about our genes -- and how our ideas about race and heredity are antiquated superstitions that reflect our biases more than our DNA. (See the bottom of this post for an important update about the upcoming US edition!)

One of the most hotly-contested fields of genetics revolves around the genetic lineage of ancient Egyptians. A new study of 90 Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic, and Roman mummies raises as many questions as it answers. Read the rest