By Jason Glynn

Hi folks, hope things are well in your world, they are great in mine. I am writing this from a sweet room in the Omni Shoreham hotel, located right in Washington D.C., so there is absolutely nothing that I can complain about.

I am very much looking forward to learning even more science stuff from numerous Smithsonian institutions while I’m here. I’m pretty excited for the National Zoo, the Natural History Museum, and the Air and Space Museum, but alas, that will be nothing new as far as breakthroughs go.

I do want to quickly apologize if there were any inaccuracies in my last column about the Big Bang Theory. Physics is not my major, in fact, physics 2 with Earl Lamoreau cost me my 4.0 GPA – I got an A-. Also, to my defense, the Big Bang Theory is some pretty heavy stuff, and I did the best I could in regurgitating and simplifying it. So this time let’s explore some breakthroughs in my comfort zone, my niche: biology.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about GMOs (genetically modified organisms), there is a lot of hysteria that surrounds them. People tend to be more afraid of something they don’t understand, and sadly most scientists are not good about explaining what they do well on regard to GMOs enough.

GMOs are everywhere… I mean everywhere; from yogurt and cheese to apples (there are no ‘natural’ apple trees left, they are all clones), to laundry detergent – which was the first GMO product sold commercially.

All of GMO consists of manipulating an organism’s genome to either express, or repress, a desired trait and now we’ve now learned how to modify a gene to fight a disease. A new process of gene-editing was used by a team of researchers led by Daniel Anderson from MIT to reverse a liver disorder in mice.

Most of your regular disorders/diseases are due to some kind of genetic mutation. A mutation is when the coding – ACTG – somewhere goes wrong. There are many ways these mutations can happen during transcription and translation.

There are many ways that your body repairs mutated genes: direct repair, base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, etc. Bacteria must be pretty crafty, and efficient, when it comes to DNA repair because the replicate prolifically so there are therefore many errors made.

This new technique that uses a bacterial protein is known as CRISPR, is a form of excision repair, but it is super-precise. It includes an enzyme, Cas9 which can be programmed for where to cut – recognizing a specific sequence of ACTG. Also included are a short RNA guide strand, and a DNA template strand. The wrong gene-coding sequence is excised, and a new sequence – that is correct – is copied from the template strand.

The mice had a liver disorder known as type 1 tyrosinemia, this is where a mutation that codes for the enzyme FAH, which breaks down the amino acid tyrosine, prevents the enzyme’s production. The tyrosine will then accumulate and this can cause liver failure. Once the gene was edited, the system was back to normal.

This process provides many hopes in combating disease. I’m sure we’ll keep hearing of advancements with this method. New RNA guide strands can be made for anything really, and same with a template strand.

The next breakthrough is near and dear to my heart – or rather my waistline. Scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), led by Dr. Barbara Kahn, believe they have found a “genetic switch” for your metabolism that will help obesity.

Your metabolism governs how efficiently your body burns calories to do everything, and people either have a “fast” or “slow” metabolism.  Ironically, “If we have an efficient [slow] metabolism, we don’t need many calories; the cells can get all the energy we need from a small number of calories,” Kahn said.  “If we have an inefficient [fast] metabolism, more calories get burned and we can eat more without gaining weight.”

They discovered that mice with a slow metabolism had more of an enzyme (NNMT) produced by a certain gene and by turning off the gene that encodes this nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) enzyme they saw a reduction in body weight. Kahn says “when we knock down this NNMT gene, we affect this [futile cycle].  We speed it up, and it will burn up more calories.” Turn off the gene, and turn down the enzyme.

The technology that makes this gene rewiring is known as antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) technology, these are short strings of DNA that can recognize a certain sequence and bind to the gene so it is not expressed. Sort of like the enzyme talked about above, but this does not alter or edit the code.

Since more than 1/3 of adults in the United States are considered obese and 8.3 percent of the American population has diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this can clearly help millions of people.

Although there are still ethical standards that must be upheld, I trust my fellow scientists that are striving to make a better world through biotechnology.