How have advances in genetics affected society? What do we need to know to make ethical decisions about genetic technologies? This course includes the study of cloning, genetic enhancement, and ownership of genetic information. Course participants will acquire the tools to explore the ethics of modern genetics and learn how to integrate these issues into their classrooms.
Recent Developments in Cloning
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From the course by American Museum of Natural History
Genetics and Society: A Course for Educators
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From the lesson
DNA Fingerprinting, Cloning, and the Future
You will explore systems biology, stem cells, and cloning and the applications of these technologies. You will also learn about the ethics of cloning, which will be the basis for your written assignment, which opens this week.
Meet the Instructors
Rob DeSalle, Ph.D.Curator
Division of Invertebrate Zoology
David Randle, Ph.D.Senior Manager of Professional Development
Education Department
Hi, and welcome to lecture two of Genetics and Society.
Today we're going to talk about how genomes can
be used in modern biology, and in modern medicine.
Specifically we're going to talk about synthetic biology, or systems biology.
We're going to talk about cloning.
In stem cells, and we're going to wrap things
up by looking at a menagerie of cloned animals.
So the way that we can use genomes, is nicely summarized with these
comic books.
We can use them in systems biology or, or synthetic
biology, and we'll explain what that is in a second here.
We can also use them in cloning.
And then finally, we can use Genomics in medicine.
Synthetic Biology is a method where by you take genes from the
human genome, and make large a-, amounts of product from those genes.
And there are lots of proteins in our bodies that are
very, very important that we would need a large amount of.
For instance, hemoglobin, other kinds of proteins that we need large amounts of.
So what we do is we take a eukaryotic
genome, a genome from a human.
And genes, in, in eukaryoetes or genes in, in
humans are a bit different from genes in bacteria.
They have what are called introns, these blue areas and exons the purple areas.
And the purple areas need to be processed away from the
blue areas, such as the in the second diagram into the third.
Where you process out the blue to get the whole gene.
The gene, then is made into a protein and
the, amino acids or the protein are these little balls.
Once you have the gene engineered, you can then
stick it into another organism such as a bacterium.
another organism that can make lots, and lots of copies
of that gene, and then produce that protein in large amounts.
Synthetic biology can also
be used to understand the three-dimensional
structure of proteins, and the three-dimensional structure
of proteins is very, very important for
how we think about interactions of proteins.
And this is important because, interactions
of proteins are involved in diseases.
So what you do is you start out with the DNA sequence information.
You then predict the 3-dimensional
structure from the DNA sequence information.
These 3-dimensional
structures are then used to look at how they might interact with each other.
And how their interactions understanding their interactions
are very, very important for understanding basic
cellular processes in disease, and other, other
kinds of things that scientists are interested in.
And then once you've understood those interactions
you put it all together, and you
can start to talk about therapies, you can start to talk about how different proteins
interact with each other.
And you can start to talk about the genetics of disease.
Now we're going to go on to cloning, and the first main thing you need to
understand about cloning is: there's a big difference
between cloning in molecular biology and cloning of animals.
Clones were used in molecular biology to make lots of copies
of a molecule so we can then use it to analyze.
And this is because of small amounts of,
of say DNA is very, very difficult to analyze.
And so, on the left hand side we see cloning as it's done in molecular biology.
So we have a gene of interest right here, red, in red.
We have a plasmid which is a small
circular piece of DNA that fits into a bacterium.
You open up the plasmid and then you stick the DNA in.
And then you take that plasmid with a new DNA in it, and then insert
it into bacteria and then the bacteria will
then make the plasmid and lots of copies.
So that you can now examine this piece of DNA in more detail.
Cloning animals shown here on the right.
>> Is much, much different.
What you do is you start out with 2 eggs, and
egg with a red nucleus and an egg with a green nucleus.
You evacuate
the egg with the green nucleus.
And then you take the red nucleus and then
insert that into the egg that had the green nucleus.
You then allow the red nucleus to develop.
Into an organism and hence you have a completely cloned the red genome
into an organism. The really important part about cloning,
is that it can be used in other aspects of biology such as stem cell research.
And the way that organisms develop, the way that we
develop As we start out as an oocyte and a sperm.
And these 2 come together to make a fertile
egg then the fertile egg then starts to develop.
Then it develops into a developmental stage called a "morula".
And the morula is simply a developmental stage, where all of the cells in
that particular body are potent to develop into any other kind of cell.
Of course when we develop, our bodies
develop into many, many different kinds of cells.
And further on in development what we get is what's called a Blastocyst.
And in the Blastocyst we have inner mass
cells right here that are what are called Pluripotent.
And the pluripotent simply means that they have many options that they can take
to turn into differentiated cells, such as cells of the circulatory
system, cells of the nervous system, and cells of the immune system.
Stem cell research is important, because what we can do is the pluripotent cells.
And then use those to regenerate tissues of
the circulatory system, nervous system, or the immune system.
And this is important in, in, some therapeutic medicine that are
on the horizon or being developed.
So to understand cloning further, we need to understand that
not all stem cell research is done with embryonic stem cells.
So, if we look at an old cell, classic
cloning would be to take a, a chunk of this.
So, a single nucleus from this, put it
into an embryo, into a, a vacated oacite and
allow that to develop into an organism. What you can do with, with old
cells in, in stem cells research. As you can take part of the
old cell, and then allow that to grow into a young
cell of various types of tissue. There are
a lot of uses of stem cells that are potentially going to help in
neurobiology, such as stem cell research in Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.
there's a lot of stem cell research that has,
has to do with bone marrow and bone structure.
There's spinal cord stem cell research and
there are muscular stem cell research program.
the promise of stem cells is often times diminished by the Ethical
problems that are involved in obtaining the stem cells for such research.
We end this lecture with a menagerie of cloned organisms.
Dolly, of course, was the first cloned animal.
Other cloned animals such as these calves Are, are, are
used in agriculture, and Cc the cat, a domestic animal
cloned but a lot of the genetic engineering and genetic
cloning that is being used is used to do genetic research.
so for instance, Andi here is a Rhesus macaque who has
had gre, green florescence protein engineered into all of her cells.
These piglets here the piglet on the
left has been genetically engineered with yellow
[INAUDIBLE]
protein that's why his nose is yellow and the 1 on the right is un engineered pig.
These 2 experiments simply demonstrate that we can
get genes from other organisms into host of organisms.
And then finally you can use cloning to understand epigenetic or
outside factors that influence genes. This is a pair of twin mice that
have been subjected to different external, environmental factors.
And you can see that in this one, who's a, a direct twin
of the one on the right has, has a developmental anomaly in its tail.
Cloning, and stem cell research, and synthetic biology promise to give us
a lot of new discoveries and a lot of new therapies that
are going to be useful in the future.
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