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Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors

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Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by Vince   » Wed Mar 25, 2015 11:38 am

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In some earlier threads, it was pointed out that the locked Meyerdahl genetic mods are dominant to a degree that doesn't exist today .

RFC provided the explanation that for parents where one is a genie but the other is not, for their progeny, a modified dominant gene from the genie parent overwrites the non-modified gene from the normal parent with the modified dominant gene version, so that a child inherits two copies of the modified dominant gene, even if one of the parents doesn't have the modified gene.

After all the discussion, it was accepted as one of those things that you just had to close your eyes and accept to enjoy the books.

RFC may well have the last laugh however, as apparently science fact is now catching up to science fiction:

New DNA construct can set off a “mutagenic chain reaction” where it "Can sweep through an entire population, changing a gene."

From my layman's reading of the article, it sounds very similar in description if not in the actual mechanics of how the locked Meyerdahl genes are passed on as fully, completely dominant copies (with no chance of a normal, recessive copy from the other parent).
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by SWM   » Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:15 pm

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Oh my gosh...

You're right, that sounds exactly like what David was talking about! If it works the way that article describe it, David was prophetic. I'm flabbergasted. And spooked at the implications of this process.
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:28 pm

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Will have to read the article thoroughly.... but now we have to start wondering.

Is this true prophetic writing, or is RFC really from the future and writing about events that truly happened? *cue dramatic music*


And now back to my maple syrup and bacon ingesting, reading the article.
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Mar 25, 2015 12:33 pm

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On actual reading, this is really damn close. Wow :shock:

It sounds like they almost literally took the Honorverse method out of the books, and made it real. Particularly the "shoe string, cutting edge Grayson" method of gene-splicing, rather than the Beowulf method.
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by roseandheather   » Wed Mar 25, 2015 5:20 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:Will have to read the article thoroughly.... but now we have to start wondering.

Is this true prophetic writing, or is RFC really from the future and writing about events that truly happened? *cue dramatic music*


And now back to my maple syrup and bacon ingesting, reading the article.


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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by JohnRoth   » Thu Mar 26, 2015 1:57 am

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The paper itself is in Science, which means it's almost certainly paywalled. From what I can see, though, this particular system would have negative fitness, for one simple reason: CRISPR works by saturation: it takes a lot of copies of the vehicle per cell to make reasonably certain that you get your change into enough of the billions of cells for it to have an effect. It would have to get into the germ line cells of the F1 generation, which wouldn't happen all the time.

So, yeah, it would be a fairly nasty tool if weaponized, but beyond that I don't see this particular technology being able to do what David needs.

Not to say it can't be done, just that this technique would need an awful lot of work to make it happen.
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by Vince   » Thu Mar 26, 2015 1:21 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:The paper itself is in Science, which means it's almost certainly paywalled. From what I can see, though, this particular system would have negative fitness, for one simple reason: CRISPR works by saturation: it takes a lot of copies of the vehicle per cell to make reasonably certain that you get your change into enough of the billions of cells for it to have an effect. It would have to get into the germ line cells of the F1 generation, which wouldn't happen all the time.

So, yeah, it would be a fairly nasty tool if weaponized, but beyond that I don't see this particular technology being able to do what David needs.

Not to say it can't be done, just that this technique would need an awful lot of work to make it happen.

If the technique was deliberately applied to a in-vitro fertilized egg, do you think that would solve the problem of getting the change into the germ cells of the F1 generation?
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Re: Dominant genes in the Honorverse and today's precursors
Post by SWM   » Thu Mar 26, 2015 3:49 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:The paper itself is in Science, which means it's almost certainly paywalled. From what I can see, though, this particular system would have negative fitness, for one simple reason: CRISPR works by saturation: it takes a lot of copies of the vehicle per cell to make reasonably certain that you get your change into enough of the billions of cells for it to have an effect. It would have to get into the germ line cells of the F1 generation, which wouldn't happen all the time.

So, yeah, it would be a fairly nasty tool if weaponized, but beyond that I don't see this particular technology being able to do what David needs.

Not to say it can't be done, just that this technique would need an awful lot of work to make it happen.

David's Meyerdahl mods were not weaponized. They were probably introduced directly into fertilized eggs. This method described in this article would cause any fertilized egg with at least one modified gene to automatically cause the paired gene to be modified. Both sets of chromosomes will be end up modified. The resulting organism, when full grown, would have the modified gene in its eggs or sperm. And any offspring would also end up with both sets of chromosomes modified, even if one set of chromosomes was not modified initially. This sounds exactly like the procreation process for the Meyerdahl mods that David described. It is self-sustaining. The modified gene produces more CRISPR-Cas9 which modifies the other set of chromosomes, in every succeeding generation. It does not rely on a limited supply of CRISPR-Cas9 RNA material.
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