So...I went to a Genetics Conference.
Anyways it was simply awesome. Well not the sitting taking 18 pages of notes from 9AM-1PM but the stuff it was over of course.
To sum it all up...(I might be missing some things he talked about and I'm by no means going into the amount of detail he went into otherwise it wouldn't be a summary...and this summary is still long...)
Diseases/syndromes. Most are uncommon but easy to find/ are related to each other. However, the common diseases are polygenic and up until very recently were hard to even find the real cause of such diseases/ syndromes. Some of those things include Type 1 Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis, and Psoriasis. The reason these are 'complex' is because they have MANY genes that affect them. Hence why they are polygenic. However, due to recent progression (starting with the Genome Project, mapping the whole human genome) in knowledge of genetics we can find the loci where where the genes that code for those things that are variants on certain people, thanks to the Human Genome Project which in part says that ALL humans are 99.9% exactly the same. The other 0.1% are where our variations are. They call those loci areas SNPs which stands for Small Scale Structural variants. Common SNPs = Common Disease. Find the SNPs and you find the area that controls something that causes the disease. This has allowed us to find out much more about those common diseases than we have ever known and may allow us to more easily prevent and fix issues to people who may have a genetic tendency to get those diseases. Another good example of a polygenic disease that this may help greatly with is Cancer. They are already finding the loci that are likely to cause cancer and with that finding ways to prevent those areas from causing cancer. Also "SNPs chips" will supposedly become available for $1000 by 2014. These SNPs chips will tell you YOUR genetic variations and if you might be likely to get certain common diseases. Yea pretty scary stuff.
Their plan is to eventually get to instead of having one medicine works for all people whom have this disease (which isn't very effective in some cases) to go to a personalized medicine for a person and their disease. This would require a Genetic Predestination Profile which pretty much will tell you your ENTIRE DNA code. Lots of information in otherwords. Through using that profile they will be able to see what are very probable disease you could get based on your genetic variations, thus they can give you a more accurate treatment, a personalized treatment.
Now...about cloning/stem cells. They have been cloning organs in labs recently. Making HUMAN made bladders, kidneys, livers, and have even made some hearts. For the bladder, and essentially the same process for the others, they take a biopsy of that person's bladder, then create a scaffolding, a biodegradable baggie in the shape of the organ and then they inject tissue type of the inner part of the bladder in the inside and then on the outside with tissue from the outer bladder and grow the cells in a test tube pretty much. The biodegradable scaffolding eventually degrades and goes away and eventually you have a real human bladder made in a lab. This could of course be used to do transplants for people and have NO rejections. But it's not very efficient.
Though in one case...a guy who had his tip of his finger cut off had a friend/relative in the genetic field for this kind of thing and they sent him the powder of a pig's bladder made in the lab and told him to apply the powder to his stub finger a couple times a day. 4 weeks later and the stub had regenerated. Partially to do with the ability of pig's bladder cells to regenerate. Yea...freaky shit.
Then on to the actual cloning of things. Dolly, the sheep, and the process that was used to clone her. The lecturer also told us of how a lab took a rat that was frozen in non-lab conditions for 16 years was cloned. This was previously thought not to be possible. What does this mean? The Woolly Mammoth may be brought back at some point but we'd need it's entire genome mapped. Well last month that was done too. (Or in other words...all the things pointing to a realistic Jurassic Park are pretty much in our grasps.)
He then lead the lecture into stem cells. He stated how stem cells work in that we use the embryo cells and thus destroy the embryo which in many a people's mind is killing an unborn baby thus a law was put up said that no funding would go towards work that destroys embryo's. So scientists looked elsewhere to get the Stem Cells. They soon found a process that they called Dedifferentiation. This involved the doing the opposite of how your cells become 'specialized'. A nerve cell for example is a specialized cell. The process involved mapping out the signals of differentiation in the pathways that early cells take to become specialized. Thus they can use those signals to turn cells from being specialized to going back to a Embryotic Stem cell like form. These "reprogrammed" ES like cells are called iPS, induced Pluripotent Stems. Then from that they can specialize them the way they need them like they would with normal Embryotic Stem Cells. Through this they could essentially fix Pancreatic Beta Cells for people with Type 1 Diabetes, fix sickled red blood cells and other things commonly heard about using stem cells for in the medicinal field. These would also allow us to study certain diseases and how they develop in specific specialized cells more easily.
So yea that's a pretty rough summary of what the guy talked about. It was pretty interesting really. If you feel like my summary was a long read then I really hope you find yourself sitting in one of his conferences sometime. lol. Again this went from 9AM to 1PM.
All in all it was a good field trip that and I managed to learn a lot and get even more interested into the field of biology.
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