Sentences with phrase «says gene drive»

«It's great that they are doing this and we are going to need to build on it so that we can come up with a good and acceptable testing pathway for these organisms,» says gene drive pioneer Austin Burt at Imperial College London.

Gene drives aren't much different, says gene drive pioneer Austin Burt, an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London.

Political scientist Kenneth Oye, PhD, author of the Science paper and director of the MIT Program on Emerging Technologies, said the gene drives do not fit into U.S. and international regulatory frameworks.

Not exact matches

The major concern is that current gene drives «are probably too powerful for us to seriously consider deploying in conservation,» says geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

«A lot of pet owners would be sad,» he says, if a gene drive went wrong and escaped worldwide during some future attempt to rid, say, Australia of its terribly destructive feral cats.

Anthony A. James of the University of California, Irvine says that the disease - carrying Anopheles mosquito species that he and his colleagues have equipped with gene drives are self - limiting.

«Researchers have understood the importance of epigenetics in driving cancer growth, but the focus has been trying to reverse epigenetic changes to specific genes,» Feinberg says.

In addition to DARPA environmentalists, biosafety experts and leading gene drive researchers say a new approach to mitigation and control is needed for the technology to advance safely.

«This was all forest» Gene - Rene Vaceus, a driver for the United Nations who returned to his native Haiti from New York a few years ago to retire, drives past the barren hills and says the verdant country of his youth is long gone.

The desire of the host to acquire antibiotic resistance genes from its guest could have driven this chain of events, he says.

Esvelt says he also attended last month's JASON meeting in San Diego, California, where he outlined how would - be bioterrorists might weaponize gene drives.

«I'm very relieved,» says Andrea Crisanti, a molecular parasitologist at Imperial College London, who is part of an effort that seeks to use gene drives to control malaria.

All of the benefits and drawbacks to gene drives are «just so hypothetical right now,» says Allison Snow, a plant population ecologist at Ohio State University.

But he is far more concerned about the potential for accidental release of gene - drive organisms by scientists, he says.

«Every powerful technology is a national security issue,» says Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who won DARPA funding to limit the spread of gene drives.

But such countermeasures are far more likely to be deployed against accidental gene - drive releases from research labs, says Esvelt.

«I'm not used to that kind of conference,» says Messer, who says he told the group about his lab's efforts to study the evolution of resistance to CRISPR gene drives in fruit flies.

The guidelines may help researchers avoid creating an accidental gene drive, but they don't apply to gene drives that would actually be used in the wild, says molecular biologist Zach Adelman of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

The whole point of a gene drive is to disperse in the wild, but government regulations are designed to keep genetic engineering out of wild organisms, says Zach Adelman, a molecular biologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Gene drive enthusiasts say these genies could wipe out malaria, saving more than half a million lives each year.

Lax or non-existent biosafety guidelines for working on gene - drive organisms increase the odds of a release, he says.

The project, which will look at how genes and environment interact to drive disease in kids, is different from its predecessors, says Kenneth Mandl, a physician, biomedical informaticist, and one of the project's leaders at Children's.

«The use of a radiofrequency - driven magnetic field is a big advance in remote gene expression because it is non-invasive and easily adaptable,» says Dordick, who is Howard P. Isermann Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and vice president of research at Rensselaer.

«Meiotic drive systems like wtf genes could potentially be used to eradicate pest populations or to facilitate the spread of desirable traits in natural populations,» Zanders says.

Gene drives already occur naturally in nearly every species we know of, Esvelt says, and researchers have been dreaming up ways to take advantage of the phenomenon for nearly a century.

We don't know enough,» Esvelt says, adding, «I'm probably the foremost scientific critic of gene drives even though I'm a leader in the field.»

Arizona State University biologist Jim Collins, who convened a group of experts to explore the potential applications for gene drive technology earlier this year, echoed Esvelt, saying, «we need different arrangements.

«A gene drive works by distorting inheritance in its favor,» says Congress participant and biochemist Kevin Esvelt of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the field's leading researchers.

«This is the first gene drive system in a major worldwide crop pest,» said Akbari, who recently moved his lab to UC San Diego from UC Riverside, where the research began.

«We've designed a gene drive system that dramatically biases inheritance in these flies and can spread through their populations,» said Buchman.

«When it spreads, breast cancer often does not spread as a single cell, but rather as a collection of cells that may have different genes driving them,» Siegel said.

Gene drive is so different from other technologies involving genetic modification that it requires a whole new way of thinking about how to evaluate and regulate it, says Jennifer Kuzma, a natural and social scientist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh who helped organize a February workshop there.

Mutations may stop gene drives» spread, and that might be a good thing, some researchers say.

Based on this report, «there is a lot of work that has to happen before we get to the point of releasing a gene drive [organism] into the environment,» says Todd Kuiken, an environmental scientist with the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

This, says Shi, drove home that the enzyme, dubbed lysine - specific demethylase 1 (LSD1), represses specific genes by maintaining unmethylated histones.

«This is a completely new way of transmitting genes,» Raoult says, and it could be driving evolution of new species in as - yet - unknown ways.

«Even when the genes driving cancer are known, clinicians don't have an efficient way to choose among the hundreds of possible drug therapies,» said study leader Kai Wang, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics and director of clinical informatics at the Institute for Genomic Medicine at CUMC.

«There are safety and environmental concerns about releasing an organism that has a gene drive into the wild,» Ossorio says.

They also show increased expression of the estrogen receptor alpha [ER +] gene that drives cell division,» says Koshy.

The special attributes of the ancestral versions of these enzyme superfamlies, and the self - reinforcing feedback system they would have formed with the first genes and proteins, would have kick - started early biology and driven the first life forms toward greater diversity and complexity, the researchers said.

«The problem is cancer cells are so diverse that even though the drugs, designed to target single cancer driving genes, often initially are effective, they eventually stop working and patients succumb to the disease,» Peter said.

The study also found «enormous structural variation,» including missing or extra copies of cancer genes, says Spellman, leading to over - or underexpression of proteins that might drive cancer growth.

«Responsible research on gene drives and gene drive technology requires consideration of values and public engagement throughout the process,» said committee co-chair Elizabeth Heitman, associate professor of medical ethics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society.

The authors say that there is no legislation specifically referring to gene drives and that their usage requires the need for local consent.

«We suspect that one of the primary factors that drives the sharing of antibiotic resistance genes is exposure to new antibiotics,» Dantas said.

«The science and technology associated with gene drives is developing very quickly,» said committee co-chair James P. Collins, Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.

Each proposed field test or environmental release of a gene - drive modified organism should be subject to robust ecological risk assessment before being approved, the report says.

The remaining gaps in our understanding of the biology of gene drives and the potential effects of gene - drive modified organisms on the environment are fundamental considerations in the development and release of gene - drive modified organisms, the report says.

«Every product of gene drive research will not be desirable,» she says.

Nature on 5 December published an unsigned editorial that said the «unfair attempt to create damaging and polarizing spin» on the Gene Drive Files could «de-legitimize scientists» role in the UN talks.»