Any scifi fan can tell you that engineering immortal killing machines is never a good idea. Still, the Pentagon’s weird science division, DARPA, wants to bioengineer “synthetic” organisms that can live forever. Oh, unless you flip the built-in and totally reliable DNA kill switch. Riiight.

They’re calling the project BioDesign and its goal is to create organisms that will live indefinitely until you issue a self-destruct-type chemical command. Of course there’s absolutely no chance the organisms will evolve a way to ignore the command, swarm, and devour all life like unstoppable cyber locusts. Nope. Not a chance.

Thankfully, the Pentagon only gave the project $6 million to play around with. It’s doubtful that such a paltry sum would be enough to overturn the most fundamental law of nature: What lives must die. Right?

Link to Wired article

As an avid Sci-Fi fan, I’ve often wished I could swap DNA with animals to gain their abilities—the speed of a cheetah, the strength of a gorilla, the seal’s ability to hold its breath for 45 minutes. But that’s just a fantasy. Reality is much, much crazier. Scientists have discovered a sea slug that’s stolen DNA and plant cell organelles from algae in order to photosynthesize. For real.

The slug, Elysia chlorotica, gobbles up algae and, through a complex digestive process, nabs chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are the solar power plants of the plant world, cell organelles that use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and other organic compounds. The slug traps these little solar-powered factories in its cells and—this is the crazy part—is able to make them work with its own metabolism. That means the slug has at some point nabbed plant DNA so it can use chloroplasts to effectively photosynthesize. It is part plant.

Of course, the snail isn’t born with chloroplasts, but it’s still amazing. According to scientists at the University of South Florida in Tampa, once the slug has gobbled up some chloroplasts, it can sustain itself with photosynthesis alone. It doesn’t have to eat. At all.

Biologists are calling it one of the freakiest discoveries of the century. Sure, they’ve known for quite a while that bacteria can swap DNA, but this is an animal. Unfortunately, they aren’t sure how the snail was able to grab the DNA necessary to support chloroplasts and photosynthesis, but it opens up a new world of possibilities. So, when can I order a shot of bat DNA so I can have echolocation, huh Science?

Link to Wired article

Wouldn’t it be great if we could suck all the extra C02 out of the atmosphere and turn it back into fuel? Climate change would subside, gas prices would fall, and we’d have a surplus of fuel. Sounds like  a dream, but researchers at UCLA might have figured out how to make it a reality.

Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have created a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, that can turn C02 into a fuel called isobutanol. Like plants, cyanobacteria use sunlight and C02 as an energy source to grow and prosper. The reachers tweaked a few genes in a strain of cyanobacteria to make it absorb more C02, then added some genes from other organisms to make it produce isobutyraldehyde gas. Smush the bacteria and stir the resulting sludge with an inexpensive catalyst and you get isobutanol, a liquid fuel that can be used like gasoline. Plus, the bacteria could be further modified to produce isobutanol directly without a catalyst.

The new strain of cyanobacteria uses energy from sunlight and C02 in the atmosphere to make the fuel. Researchers say they could grow the bacteria in ponds next to fossil fuel power plants to reclaim some of the emitted C02. Of course, there’s nothing stopping them from growing the cyanobacteria all over the place to help reduce greenhouse gas and provide us with ample fuel for our 1967 Camaros.

Link to Gizmag article

Seems like they’re injecting everything with glow-y jellyfish genes nowadays. The latest victims of the glow-in-the-dark craze are prairie voles.

Scientists injected a jellyfish gene that makes a fluorescent protein into vole embryos. When the embryos grew into itty-bitty baby voles, they glowed. Even better, the voles were able to pass the glow gene down to their offspring.

Link to ScienceDaily article

As if hot dogs weren’t disgusting enough—now we can grow them in a vat of nutrient-rich goo under fluorescent lights. A team of scientists from the Netherlands, hell-bent on grossing out the known world, have grown a hunk of pork in their lab, without a pig.

The team took muscle cells from a live pig and, hold your lunch, plopped them in a solution made from the blood of animal fetuses. The cells multiplied and clumped together, producing what the scientists describe as “a soggy form of pork.”

Before the meat hits the market, scientists will need to figure out how to toughen it up and maybe even mix in some tasty vat-grown pork fat.

Scientists estimate that the fake meat could cut tons of carbon—livestock is one of the largest producers of carbon dioxide worldwide. The grown meat would also be safe for vegetarians as no animals would be harmed in its production. But the question remains: Will vegetarians eat vat-grown pork from a tube?

Link to Gizmag article

A team at University of Wyoming has isolated two genes responsible for producing the proteins that make spider glue so sticky. From Gizmag:

Supported by the National Science Foundation, a team led by Omer Choresh from the University of Wyoming has in fact recently reported on an extensive study involving the DNA sequencing of the orb-weaving spiders Nephila clavipes andAraneus gemmoides. The group identified two sophisticated proteins that have evolved over millions of years and are believed to be responsible for the glue’s strength.

The plan now is to stick the genes into bacteria that will then spit out spider-web glue in quantity. The glue could be a valuable alternative to surgical glues or Elmer’s.

Link to Gizmag article

“It’s evolving. It’s doing what we designed it to do.” That sentence isn’t from the chilling trailer for the next Michael Chrichton adaptation. It’s the words of an honest-to-goodness biochemist describing his creation, a synthetic self-replicating jumble of chemicals called AEGIS—Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System. 

AEGIS is an experiment devised by biochemist Steve Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution that aims to get at the roots of life itself by creating artificial self-replicating chemicals that are capable of evolution. And it works. Benner has AEGIS happily replicating and evolving in a beaker in his Florida lab. What makes AEGIS different than everyday life? For starters, it has 12 base pairs instead of four. Beyond that, information is sketchy, but Benner assured Discover News that AEGIS is thriving. In fact, it’s the first synthetic genetic system capable of Darwinian evolution.

Now all we have to do is wait for it to escape and consume us all.

I plan to contact Benner in the coming weeks to get more info about AGIS—how it was created, what he’s learned. Look for an update.

And thanks to Matt Chisholm for the tip!

Link to MSNBC article ]]> http://scidujour.com/2009/03/artificial-life-thy-name-is-aegis/feed/ 0 http://scidujour.com/2008/06/early-classes-deemed-unjust/ http://scidujour.com/2008/06/early-classes-deemed-unjust/#comments Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:20:43 +0000 dustindriver http://scidujour.com/?p=60 The early morning light lances gleefully through the holes in your mini-blinds, searing your tender eyelids and turning your slothful dreamworld bloody pink. For some of us, dawn brings a hellish realization that we’ll trudge through the day wearing a shroud of exhaustion, a clammy sheet of fatigue that will dull our senses, smarts and motivation. We’re called “night owls,” and we’re forced to live in a world run by early risers.

Researchers in Portugal have proven what we’ve always known; night people are burdened with greater sleep debt during the week, sleep more on weekends and suffer more sleep-wake irregularities than early birds. Ana A. Gomes, of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, studied 1,654 undergrads at her university, where most classes start at 9 a.m. She found that night people were at a significant disadvantage when compared to early risers. Their performance and grades suffered, as did their sleep. She found the same performance deficits even after night owls were given a few weeks to adjust to a morning schedule.

Gomes believes that the university should adapt to the students’ variations in sleep-wake cycles, offering at least two different schedules. From the ScienceDaily article:

“Given the inevitable existence of diurnal-type variations from person to person, we may infer that any single standardized schedule is likely to be inappropriate. We share the idea that a wiser alternative would be the availability of at least two schedules (early/later), so that all diurnal types may gain. Sleep education would also be of great value in helping students to better adjust the sleep-wake cycle to externally imposed timetables.”

With any luck, Gomes’ suggestion will be taken to heart, both in school and in the workplace. A simple switch in schedule could improve learning and productivity for night owls. Globalization and digitally connected virtual offices should also help shatter rigidly structured work schedules. Internet connectivity means that workers and students can collaborate without being in the same space, or even country, 24-hours a day.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

 Irina Conboy, assistant professor of bioengineering and an investigator at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center and at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), led the research team. She noticed that adult mice stem cells, when placed in “young” blood, behaved like young stem cells. They kicked into overdrive, dividing and repairing. Conversely, young stem cells slowed to a crawl when placed in “old” blood.

The researcher discovered that the cells were responding to two natural chemical signals via a set of receptors. The first receptor, called Notch, activates elated cell replication. The second, a receptor for the protein TGF-beta, sets off a chain reaction that slows cell division. Too much Notch and cells can divide too quickly, hastening tumor and cancer growth. Too much TGF-beta and adult stem cells slow down; cells succumb to the ravages of aging.

Conboy and her team knocked out the “aging pathway” that halts cell replication using a method of RNA interference and a custom antibody. The result: Old mice with the stem cells of young mice.

More research needs to be carried out before any such methods can be used on humans. Conboy fears that interrupting the aging pathway could lead to hyperactive cell division and increased rates of cancer. 

Link to U.C. Berkeley article.

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future? 
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

What would a “refinery” that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like? 

They’re just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that’s how wine and beer are made. We’re using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.

How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way? 
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

It’s a must-read interview that’ll fill even the most pessimistic doomsday prognosticators with warm fuzzy optimism. Kinda like wine and beer. All hail our genetically modified bacterial overlords!

Link to Newsweek article.