New Research Shows What We Can Accomplish by Manipulating Biology (arstechnica.com) 24
Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 shares "an interesting spin on biotechnology tools that we've been seeing explode lately like Crisper-CAS and mRNA."
Ars Technica writes: This is in no way a route to a practical therapy, but it does provide a fantastic window into what we can accomplish by manipulating biology. The whole effort described in the new paper is focused on a simple idea: if you figure out how to wreck one of the virus's key proteins, it won't be able to infect anything. And, conveniently, our cells have a system for destroying proteins, since that's often a useful thing to do...
This system relies on a small protein called "ubiquitin." When a protein is to be targeted for destruction, enzymes called ubiquitin ligases chemically link a chain of ubiquitins to it. These serve as a tag that is recognized by enzymes that digest any proteins with ubiquitin attached to them. So, the idea behind the new work is to identify a key viral protein and figure out how to attach ubiquitin to it...
Unfortunately, there are no proteins that attach ubiquitin to the viral spike protein. Or, rather, there were no proteins that fit that description. But a team at Harvard has now produced one.
They fed atomic-level details of the proteins' structure into software that finds the most energetically-favored interactions between proteins, simulated mutations, and eventually engineered the most promising ones to test their efficacy, ultimately cutting the presence of the viral spike protein in tested cells by 60 percent.
Ars Technica ultimately calls it "A mildly insane idea for disabling the coronavirus," though "Unfortunately, it's also likely to be absolutely useless... this is likely to be a non-starter, especially given that there are promising vaccines and many other potential therapies ahead of it in the pipeline for safety testing."
Yet "while the details of this work aren't really significant, the fact that we've developed all the underlying technology needed for it is worth keeping in mind."
Ars Technica writes: This is in no way a route to a practical therapy, but it does provide a fantastic window into what we can accomplish by manipulating biology. The whole effort described in the new paper is focused on a simple idea: if you figure out how to wreck one of the virus's key proteins, it won't be able to infect anything. And, conveniently, our cells have a system for destroying proteins, since that's often a useful thing to do...
This system relies on a small protein called "ubiquitin." When a protein is to be targeted for destruction, enzymes called ubiquitin ligases chemically link a chain of ubiquitins to it. These serve as a tag that is recognized by enzymes that digest any proteins with ubiquitin attached to them. So, the idea behind the new work is to identify a key viral protein and figure out how to attach ubiquitin to it...
Unfortunately, there are no proteins that attach ubiquitin to the viral spike protein. Or, rather, there were no proteins that fit that description. But a team at Harvard has now produced one.
They fed atomic-level details of the proteins' structure into software that finds the most energetically-favored interactions between proteins, simulated mutations, and eventually engineered the most promising ones to test their efficacy, ultimately cutting the presence of the viral spike protein in tested cells by 60 percent.
Ars Technica ultimately calls it "A mildly insane idea for disabling the coronavirus," though "Unfortunately, it's also likely to be absolutely useless... this is likely to be a non-starter, especially given that there are promising vaccines and many other potential therapies ahead of it in the pipeline for safety testing."
Yet "while the details of this work aren't really significant, the fact that we've developed all the underlying technology needed for it is worth keeping in mind."
Nothing compared to what we can achieve (Score:2)
by IGNORING biology! (for more info, see instagram #funny).
Re: Nothing compared to what we can achieve (Score:2)
What if I am a person, amd not part of the Facebook swarm body and hence don't interact with Instagram?
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Then you're lucky that you don't have to spend time reading it.
What really matters (Score:1)
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YES! just think of all the tiny men who might not have become so insecure it becomes a mental illness (narcissistic.)
Nice example of what I mean: (Score:2)
Lost of power, used with very little skill or care. More stumbling than controlled.
I'm not against genetic modifications. Quite the opposite.
I'm against giving power tools to a toddler species!
Play around in the lab as much as you want. But don't try to mess up my environment before you're grown up and gotten good.
Arrogance comes from cluelessness about one's cluelessness.
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Progress! It's shiny!! (Score:1)
It's wonderful to know that scientists - who always know exactly what they are doing, and who never overlook any long-term "side effects" of their marvellous innovations - have worked out how to make the body destroy arbitrary proteins in every cell.
Luckily, nothing could go wrong. It's not as if everything that matters in the body were made of proteins, after all.
There's another problem with this (Score:3)
That protein shape isn't only found on the surface of the virus. The virus has that protein because it very closely resembles the ACE2 protein, so that the virus can use the ACE2 receptor to enter cells.
So it's likely that this would also attach to ACE2, causing a host of problems for that.
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I, for one... (Score:2)
...welcome my furry overlords.
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People wishing for cat girls are quite not aware of what they're asking for.
It's cats, but with hands, and enough stature to reach even the highest and well secured things.
They will just drop EVERYTHING.
Our Gut Bacteria Might Be Pulling our Strings (Score:2)
Ah, my old nemesis, ubiquitin! (Score:2)
"We meet again on a new battleground, in this organism's macroscopic cellular structure [youtu.be]!"
"Yes, but remember, I am everywhere! I am LEGION! You'll never conquer this organism, unobtanium!"
Etc., etc.
where to get (Score:2)
ubiquitin
I wonder where that's found.
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I've heard the problem isn't locating ubiquitin so much as harvesting it. It requires special equipment made from the rarest of rare-earth metals, especially unobtanium.
Crisper? (Score:2)
Crisper-CAS
It is CRISPR-Cas [wikipedia.org] without the E, actually