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Recent Developments in Cloning

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Genetics and Society: A Course for Educators

American Museum of Natural History

4.6 (77 ratings) | 6.8K Students Enrolled

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.

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4.6 (77 ratings)

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AA

Mar 24, 2019

Really very informative thank you so much for this course.

JG

Oct 19, 2015

this was a fantastic course. Genetics fascinates me!

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.

Recent Developments in Cloning8:44

Science Bulletins: Cloning and Conservation9:30

Taught By

Rob DeSalle, Ph.D.
Curator
David Randle, Ph.D.
Senior Manager of Professional Development

Transcript

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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