[HN Gopher] CRISPR-like tools that finally can edit mitochondria...
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CRISPR-like tools that finally can edit mitochondria DNA
Author : ck2
Score : 138 points
Date : 2025-10-14 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Miaourt wrote:
| A nice soul have a non-paywalled version to share ?
| byrantech wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03307-x.pdf
|
| this should work?
| Miaourt wrote:
| Maybe I'm just stupid, but I'm seeing the typical "fade-out"
| at the bottom of the article, followed by a subscription-
| wall, suggesting more of the content is behind this gate.
| Tho, maybe the "Making the edit" infographic is really the
| bottom of the article...
| bil7 wrote:
| the only current archive on archive.is also has that. Watch
| this space for a complete archive, hopefully:
|
| https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-0
| 2...
| varispeed wrote:
| Imagine the future - vibe coding own DNA.
|
| "Hey ChatGPT, I need third ear. Make it grow in two months."
| Iolaum wrote:
| Now we "just" need a CRISPR-MCP server :p
| mountainriver wrote:
| On the public internet
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I've been reading a lot about biochemistry lately and it's
| actually insane how complicated all of life is. The idea that
| we can edit genes at all is a miracle and I think most software
| engineers significantly underestimate how hard it would be to
| make meaningful changes to our bodies through gene editing.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Recently have been reading the Gene by Mukherjee. I'm amazed
| at what had been accomplished in the mid 20th Century. A lot
| of what still seems crazy now was done already albeit in
| small scale.
| fragmede wrote:
| Growing new appendages is clearly much more involved, but a
| Youtuber was able to give themselves lactose tolerance for a
| couple of months (they were lactose intolerant before).
| Assuming it wasn't faked for views, and that we are what we
| eat, that suggests other modifications to gut bateria aren't
| inconceivably far off.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Considering that there aren't any mammals that can regrow
| appendages, chances are adding an appendage would be
| impossible with gene editing because it would require
| editing both the mother and offspring to support novel
| embryonic development.
| clort wrote:
| I seem to think that human children can regrow the tips
| of their finger if it is cut off (I think the nail is ok,
| not the joint) though I don't know where I learned that,
| perhaps a first aid course. I've never tried it though.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That is correct, as long as the injury doesn't take out
| the nail bed. That implies that there is some sort of
| growth factor involved with the nail bed as a signaling
| center, but regrown finger tips are a very simple case
| compared to actual appendages.
|
| Finger tips are mostly fatty soft tissue minus the
| muscle, which is known to regenerate. Stuff like nerves
| are a completely different issue and children who regrow
| finger tips usually lose finer sensory input like two
| point discrimination.
| seanhunter wrote:
| My understanding is that lactose tolerance is a
| particularly interesting case because lactose _tolerance_
| is in fact the mutation and lactose _intolerance_ is the
| "default". It's just that for historical reasons lactose
| tolerance obviously conferred an advantage in Europe in
| particular which is why the mutation persisted. That's why
| around 40% of the global population are lactose tolerant
| and intolerance is the global norm.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
| jryb wrote:
| If we're thinking about the same youtuber, I found that
| experimental design to be really poor. They said they were
| lactose intolerant as a child, but they didn't confirm that
| they still were (decades?) later. I was lactose intolerant
| until I was six and then it just resolved on its own
| (perhaps this wasn't even lactose intolerance but a
| reaction to something associated with lactose).
|
| What they should have done was eat a pizza before the
| treatment, gotten sick, then taken the treatment and shown
| that the same pizza had no effect afterwards.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Unfortunately biology only does spaghetti code.
| BartjeD wrote:
| We just haven't found God's IDE yet
| rabf wrote:
| Maybe this: https://teselagen.com/
|
| Nice list here: https://github.com/davidliwei/awesome-
| CRISPR
| psunavy03 wrote:
| from primordial_chaos import Universe
|
| # TODO: This is a complete hack that needs to be
| refactored, but it works for now.
|
| def quantum_physics() -> Universe:
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I read a book about the immune system and it's actually
| insane how much tech debt there is in there. We have
| several systems, each one built a hundred million years
| after the previous one. Each one targets the kind of
| threats that were prevalent then but are still there
| because they haven't completely disappeared. So much
| complexity, and systems can go haywire so easily -
| autoimmune diseases, allergic reactions and so on.
|
| And yet, like a startup that found product market fit with
| a garbage tech stack, this pile of jenga spaghetti is still
| going strong. Complexity doesn't matter, people dying
| because they looked at a peanut doesn't matter - ultimately
| this spaghetti works well enough to get humans to where we
| are today.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Great comment, which book did you read?
| themafia wrote:
| It doesn't really. The START and STOP codons define clear
| cut frames for your cells to use. Think of your DNA like
| ECC memory. There's a bunch of extra stuff in there which
| makes it suitable for use as a memory storage. It has
| nothing to do with the actual replicated genes and their
| associated proteins or the role of those within the body.
|
| The really cool part about that storage is it is
| environmentally sensitive. So as the environment changes
| around your DNA it's shape slightly changes and so the
| available START sites also change which alters the types
| and numbers of genes that are copied for use.
|
| Biology isn't one system it's dozens all stacked and
| layered on top of each other. It's like trying to
| understand computing by watching what individual electrons
| do. Of course it looks messy. On the larger scale it's far
| more elegant.
| dekhn wrote:
| start and stop codons are not as clear cut as you're
| implying (there are often several start sites), and
| variable splicing adds a bunch more stochasticity.
| themafia wrote:
| There are also 6 potential open reading frames in any
| span of DNA. 3 phases and two directions. You're looking
| at it backwards though. The fact that there are options
| means the DNA can have the same meaning but a different
| electrochemical signature. It's a structural memory. It's
| both your genes and the necessary gradient to cause them
| to arrange in your chromosomes correctly.
|
| You call it stochastic. I call it scaffolding.
| dekhn wrote:
| What you're saying makes absolutely zero sense from a
| modern DNA research perspective.
| themafia wrote:
| I'm not here to represent the modern DNA research
| perspective. You seem to have adequate access to that
| already. I'm a programmer. If that means you must
| discount my point of view entirely then so be it.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I'm definitely outside my wheelhouse but I've been thinking
| about this lately.
|
| I heard that CRISPR can only cut segments that match a
| pattern, so if there are other genes between the ends that
| are cut, then those are lost as well. So to do a proper
| substitution, we'd need to sequence the patient's genes
| between the cuts, and possibly the whole rest of their
| genome, to make sure that any patterns don't appear anywhere
| else, so that nothing important is removed elsewhere.
|
| That sounds insurmountable, but it may not be. Human beings
| basically all have nearly identical DNA, so maybe we can just
| derive someone's diff from a known DNA sample. If I ever won
| the internet lottery, that's the sort of tool that I would
| want to invest in.
|
| Then we probably need more vectors to get CRISPR where it
| needs to go. That sounds like more of an engineering
| challenge to me than having to invent something new. Or at
| least, the number of vectors found might correlate with R&D
| funding.
|
| It's not that hard for me to imagine getting the recipe
| figured out to the point that it's 100% reliable and can even
| be delivered to specific parts of the body with a certain
| frequency of light, for example.
|
| Then come up with an iterative process, probably using AI, to
| catalog and repair all major genetic disorders.
|
| I don't see too much mystery there, even if the final recipes
| seem byzantine to human understanding. But I wanted to be a
| genetic engineer before I got into computers when I was 12,
| so I've had a long time to think about it. If AI eats the
| programming world like it looks like it's going to, maybe we
| can find work in biotech. Then it's probably 5-10 years
| before gene editing is a solved problem.
| thwarted wrote:
| This reminded me of the 1995 The Outer Limits episode "The New
| Breed".
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't like to be alarmist, but some of this is a little
| scary, IMO. Small changes in a society can have massive impacts
| over generations. If you look at what happened to experiments
| with feeding house cats an altered diet in just a few
| generations. People are already eating a lot of things that
| wouldn't even be considered food a couple centuries ago, and
| maybe still shouldn't be.
|
| We have a lot of increasing hormone production issues in
| western society already, I'm not sure that fiddling with things
| further is a real solution here without risking a lot of damage
| to society as a whole.
| lazyfanatic42 wrote:
| The amount of change that has happened just because of The
| Internet, and the speed of those changes is already too fast
| for us to cope with. We haven't even properly coped with that
| single change as a society and things are just
| accelerating...
| zafka wrote:
| > If you look at what happened to experiments with feeding
| house cats an altered diet in just a few generations.
|
| Can you point to a reference?
| tracker1 wrote:
| https://drsurinderarora.com/articles/f/nutrition-for-
| dentiti...
| guluarte wrote:
| "Hey you #$#@ remove the ear from my anus"
| peder wrote:
| And then when it gets it wrong and you ask why it grew a nose
| instead of an ear: "You're absolutely right! I can fix this!"
| echelon wrote:
| You mean cancer.
|
| Or a wicked disease state like Huntington's that causes your
| DNA to slip.
|
| Simple failures with catostrophic outcomes are much more
| likely than rewiring and restarting all of the developmental
| program across huge cell and tissue populations.
|
| It would be more likely to grow transplant tissue
| exogenously. It's far safer than using the body as a test
| tube.
|
| These gene editing techniques are used to fix simple
| (typically one cause) genetic diseases. Not reengineer live
| organisms "in flight".
| hinkley wrote:
| Your liver is covered with ears and they've started
| spreading to your lymph nodes.
| rolisz wrote:
| Take a look at Michael Levin's work: he's been able to get
| animals to grow eyes on their legs (or something similar),
| without gene manipulation, but just by messing with
| bioelectrical fields. Paper:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3587383/?utm YouTube
| interview: https://youtu.be/Kpx5isuKD1c?si=RU6fztq_RexUvYif
| burnte wrote:
| Two months go by then suddenly three more ears appear on your
| head.
|
| Damn those hallucinations!
| koeng wrote:
| We've known TALENs work for years. For example -
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4817924/ - from 2015
|
| I worked on a project many years ago to do RNA import into yeast
| mitochondria (and then hopefully reverse transcribe there).
| Didn't work, and a lot of the info on RNA import into the
| mitochondria is... suspect.
|
| Mitochondria engineering is just actually tough. 30 years and no
| new protocols for getting DNA in there :(
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(page generated 2025-10-14 23:01 UTC)