wow, science at its best

[SteveP]

In laboratory dish, researchers shut down extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome - Science - Boston.com

imagine this.

[Jaq]

Bit scary, too.

As that level of manipulation becomes possible, made-to-order babies will become the norm. Sure, there are already laws against such tampering, but the wealthy won't care. There'll always be a country somewhere where those who can afford it will go to have their uber-babies cooked up and delivered.

[Tom]

Interesting that it is UMASS Medical, I'll have to ask my brother about it when I see him this weekend. He's a professor there in molecular medicine, the article doesn't mention microRNA but this sure sounds like what it does.

[MarkC]

If you want to see more go here:

Researchers turn off Down’s syndrome genes : Nature News & Comment

and:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture12394.html

and basic background on Xist and chromosomal inactivation here:

http://bioweb.wku.edu/courses/biol56...inactivarg.pdf


We'll ignore the nice DNA engineering parts which are also cool.

Clever stuff using a mechanism of X-inactivation to target an aneuploidy. Getting the gene regulation correctly balanced might be an issue for autosomes in aneuploidys. With X inactivation there is a "counting" element and cis-regulatory factors that in total result in one copy of X being transcribed and one being silenced (in females).

Xist is a 17 kb +/- transcript so it's an RNA but not a microRNA.

Awesome research.

[sk_tle]

Well, people seemed to be surprised when we told them we didn't want to know the sex of our child before the delivery and the medical staff told us we were only a few in a year to do so.

World is changing. People become control freaks.