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Posted by ck2 6 hours ago

CRISPR-like tools that finally can edit mitochondria DNA(www.nature.com)
114 points | 25 comments
koeng 1 hour ago|
We've known TALENs work for years. For example - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4817924/ - from 2015

I worked on a project many years ago to do RNA import into yeast mitochondria (and then hopefully reverse transcribe there). Didn't work, and a lot of the info on RNA import into the mitochondria is... suspect.

Mitochondria engineering is just actually tough. 30 years and no new protocols for getting DNA in there :(

varispeed 3 hours ago||
Imagine the future - vibe coding own DNA.

"Hey ChatGPT, I need third ear. Make it grow in two months."

rolisz 17 minutes ago||
Take a look at Michael Levin's work: he's been able to get animals to grow eyes on their legs (or something similar), without gene manipulation, but just by messing with bioelectrical fields. Paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3587383/?utm YouTube interview: https://youtu.be/Kpx5isuKD1c?si=RU6fztq_RexUvYif
peder 1 hour ago|||
And then when it gets it wrong and you ask why it grew a nose instead of an ear: "You're absolutely right! I can fix this!"
echelon 1 hour ago||
You mean cancer.

Or a wicked disease state like Huntington's that causes your DNA to slip.

Simple failures with catostrophic outcomes are much more likely than rewiring and restarting all of the developmental program across huge cell and tissue populations.

It would be more likely to grow transplant tissue exogenously. It's far safer than using the body as a test tube.

These gene editing techniques are used to fix simple (typically one cause) genetic diseases. Not reengineer live organisms "in flight".

CSMastermind 2 hours ago|||
I've been reading a lot about biochemistry lately and it's actually insane how complicated all of life is. The idea that we can edit genes at all is a miracle and I think most software engineers significantly underestimate how hard it would be to make meaningful changes to our bodies through gene editing.
toasterlovin 2 hours ago||||
Unfortunately biology only does spaghetti code.
testdelacc1 2 hours ago|||
I read a book about the immune system and it’s actually insane how much tech debt there is in there. We have several systems, each one built a hundred million years after the previous one. Each one targets the kind of threats that were prevalent then but are still there because they haven’t completely disappeared. So much complexity, and systems can go haywire so easily - autoimmune diseases, allergic reactions and so on.

And yet, like a startup that found product market fit with a garbage tech stack, this pile of jenga spaghetti is still going strong. Complexity doesn’t matter, people dying because they looked at a peanut doesn’t matter - ultimately this spaghetti works well enough to get humans to where we are today.

BartjeD 2 hours ago|||
We just haven't found God's IDE yet
rabf 2 hours ago||
Maybe this: https://teselagen.com/

Nice list here: https://github.com/davidliwei/awesome-CRISPR

fragmede 2 hours ago||||
Growing new appendages is clearly much more involved, but a Youtuber was able to give themselves lactose tolerance for a couple of months (they were lactose intolerant before). Assuming it wasn't faked for views, and that we are what we eat, that suggests other modifications to gut bateria aren't inconceivably far off.
seanhunter 59 minutes ago|||
My understanding is that lactose tolerance is a particularly interesting case because lactose tolerance is in fact the mutation and lactose intolerance is the "default". It's just that for historical reasons lactose tolerance obviously conferred an advantage in Europe in particular which is why the mutation persisted. That's why around 40% of the global population are lactose tolerant and intolerance is the global norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence

throwup238 2 hours ago|||
Considering that there aren’t any mammals that can regrow appendages, chances are adding an appendage would be impossible with gene editing because it would require editing both the mother and offspring to support novel embryonic development.
lanfeust6 2 hours ago|||
Recently have been reading the Gene by Mukherjee. I'm amazed at what had been accomplished in the mid 20th Century. A lot of what still seems crazy now was done already albeit in small scale.
tracker1 2 hours ago|||
I don't like to be alarmist, but some of this is a little scary, IMO. Small changes in a society can have massive impacts over generations. If you look at what happened to experiments with feeding house cats an altered diet in just a few generations. People are already eating a lot of things that wouldn't even be considered food a couple centuries ago, and maybe still shouldn't be.

We have a lot of increasing hormone production issues in western society already, I'm not sure that fiddling with things further is a real solution here without risking a lot of damage to society as a whole.

zafka 2 minutes ago|||
> If you look at what happened to experiments with feeding house cats an altered diet in just a few generations.

Can you point to a reference?

lazyfanatic42 1 hour ago|||
The amount of change that has happened just because of The Internet, and the speed of those changes is already too fast for us to cope with. We haven't even properly coped with that single change as a society and things are just accelerating...
Iolaum 3 hours ago|||
Now we "just" need a CRISPR-MCP server :p
mountainriver 3 hours ago||
On the public internet
thwarted 2 hours ago|||
This reminded me of the 1995 The Outer Limits episode "The New Breed".
guluarte 1 hour ago||
"Hey you #$#@ remove the ear from my anus"
Miaourt 4 hours ago|
A nice soul have a non-paywalled version to share ?
byrantech 4 hours ago|
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03307-x.pdf

this should work?

Miaourt 3 hours ago|||
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I'm seeing the typical "fade-out" at the bottom of the article, followed by a subscription-wall, suggesting more of the content is behind this gate. Tho, maybe the "Making the edit" infographic is really the bottom of the article...
bil7 3 hours ago||
the only current archive on archive.is also has that. Watch this space for a complete archive, hopefully:

https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-02...