Comment on synthetic biology cannabis molecule production in reddit | and potential future medicine.

Comment on thread on bioprinters and agelessness

Neurons in mice, iirc, last over twice as long as mice limited only by new host lifespan, think it was [in] rats [when transplanted].  In humans neurons last at least 50% longer than average as evidenced by the longest lived human.   Some have hypothesized that neurons may not exhibit signs of aging in and of themselves, but that their decay may be the result of aging supporting cells.    Therapies are underway to try and rejuvenate supporting cells, and if these ideas are right, they may reverse signs of brain decay if caught on time before neural loss occurs.

Right now bowhead neurons, unless we find there's regeneration throughout their brains, these neurons likely exhibit high metabolic activity, have over 200 year lifespan, and do not likely differ too much from our neurons in terms of maintenance and repair.   That additional virtual century likely came without nature having to implement ever more elaborate solutions as hypothesized by those who believe extensive engineering is necessary to achieve agelessness.

The longer lived a species the closer it is to agelessness, the more minute the necessary changes should be, and perhaps they may be inducible even by drug cocktails.

Now as for bioprinters, the issue of need for vasculature, for nutrient exchange and waste removal, the problems with deep 3d printing, could be solved in part if we used genetic modification to imbue the ability to vastly reduce metabolic rate perhaps even suspend it whie conditions improve and become adequate.   

source link

biotech news from past | better regeneration | genetics

The absence of a single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to be reserved only for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander: regeneration. Researchers demonstrate that mice that lack the gene can regenerate lost or damaged tissue, suggesting that such an ability may be granted to mammals by blocking the effects of p21.-sciencedaily 2010 source

automated cell cultures

Letting a robotic system do your cell culturing can pay off in more ways than just sparing you carpal tunnel. If you have to produce a large number of cells for high-throughput cell-based assays, it can free up hours of time, depending on how many people in your lab do manual cell culture. “If each person in your group has more than two or three cell types to culture, or if you have to feed [or replace the media on] cells frequently, especially on weekends, you should look into automation,”-source link

Machinery to automate the process of growing and maintaining cell cultures can ease the work of biologist, and make time for more research.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital...

Comment on Craig Venter's comment on AI within the video:   The delicacy of computer programs, is a valid criticism .  But it is not like biology itself is entirely immune from errors that effectively crash or kill the organism.   There are lethal mutations that impede viability, and even viable organisms once grown can still accumulate errors and develop cancer resulting in death.   Cancer immunity and anticancer mechanisms keep lethality of error accumulation at bay, similarly software can be made to tolerate and recuperate from errors that would otherwise be fatal, within a stably coded simulation the elements within can follow rules allowing for arbitrary evolution.

So all in all I would say that while computer code tends to be a bit more delicate and less error tolerant than biological systems, that need not necessarily be the case, and systems can be made that are far more robust and able to handle the eventualilty of errors,  programs such as genetic algorithms show that evolutionary like change is possible, which is what I think was being implied might not be possible due to the delicate nature of the system.

Possibility of synthetic biological neural chips

If you look at a human, the amount of non nervous supporting tissue volume is vast, but this is not the case for all animals.  Some animals have vast nervous system volume with seemingly minimal supporting tissue volume.

"We discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about 25 percent of their legs."- sciencedaily news article

In theory such neural tissue could be hypothetically adapted to work in an artificial biochip, as it requires very little  volume of supporting tissue.   It would be an engineering challenge.  But one can imagine an interweaving of the minute support organ systems creating a large sheet of neural tissue. With some spacing and oxygenation and nutrient systems even volumetric systems are possible. 

 One of the problems observed in nature, including the human brain,  is that as neural communication length grows, natural systems change from analog neural transmission to digital action potential transmission which is less energy efficient, also long range transmission even with myelination is relatively slow.  But an artificial synthetic biology neural chip could make use of optimal optical interconnects that transmit at the speed of light between sections of the chip.

Insects depending on species can go for days without water or food, some can even withstand prolonged oxygen deprivation for tens of hours.   If metabolic suspension capabilities are brought into the equation the systems can hypothetically last for decades without food, water or oxygen.   So these are very resilient chips if designed appropriately.  Not fickle(On a side note: I'm not very fond of petri dishes, and growing things with special finicky settings, growth media, etc, I prefer full multicellular support structures that allow for biological cells to basically sit right there out on the open environment at room temperature and with minimal maintenance.)

Eventually a self contained gas exchange, and nutrient recycling with electric energy conversion(electrical to chemical to carry out recycling and power the molecular machinery) could make the entire computing system fully enclosed needing neither external water nor external food nor external oxygen.

Once the genetic regulation that regulates connectivity and learning is optimized such a system could be used for arbitrary applications.   In the unlikely event that it is true as some neuroscientists, seem to imply, that even a single biological neuron is basically supercomputer level maybe even as some hypothesize able to do quantum computations(very unlikely), well a biochip with billions of said neurons would vastly out compete any digital computer, if any of the implied performance hypotheses are true.   Even if the performance hypotheses aren't true, the energy efficiency durability and performance of such systems would be excellent.

quotes from another article on human animal chimeras and possibility for unlimited compatible organs avaialble for transplantation

-By modifying genes, scientists can now easily change the DNA in pig or sheep embryos so that they are genetically incapable of forming a specific tissue. Then, by adding stem cells from a person, they hope the human cells will take over the job of forming the missing organ, which could then be harvested from the animal for use in a transplant operation....

 “We can make an animal without a heart. We have engineered pigs that lack skeletal muscles and blood vessels,” says Daniel Garry, a cardiologist who leads a chimera project at the University of Minnesota...

One reason is that if his iPS cells develop inside an animal, the resulting tissue will actually be his, a kind of perfectly matched replacement part. Desperately ill people on organ waiting lists might someday order a chimera and wait less than a year for their own custom organ to be ready. “I really don’t see much risk to society,” he says..-source technologyreview

Interesting snippet from another article on human animal chimera research.   A possible near term solution to the problem of organ transplants. 

Very very interesting things could be done with chimeras, I see a lot of potential.   You can eventually not only design these to be compatible with humans but you can use these to research the function and effects of genetically modified superorgans.    Given that rat mouse organ chimeras have already taken place, it would be interesting to see if replacing one of a few organs with the longer lived version organs have any significant effect on lifespan. 

Another possibility is that if the mother animals are suitably modified they might even be able to function as living artificial wombs.    Accelerating the arrival of artificial womb technologies.  Artificial wombs would when combined with a few other techs allow for same sex couples to have children irregardless of their biological sex and it would also help enable single individuals to reproduce, and would free women from having to carry the delicate baby around for 9 months everywhere they go.

Dna Hybrids and Chimeras, high speed possible solution to organ transplant needs.

 "But by the end of the year, eGenesis -- another company eyeing pigs for xenotransplantation and founded by the infamous engineered-biology scientist George Church -- announced it had successfully modified 62 genes in pig embryos using CRISPR tools. Progress happens at light speed in this field.

Overnight advances in gene editing have had other effects. The NIH recently announced it will lift a moratorium on providing federal funding for research involving humanized animal embryos, which many expect to result in an explosion of research."-source link

 While genetically altering animal cells to be more compatible with humans is promising, the idea of humanizing embryos, especially if it involves using chimera research, aka mixing human and animal cells is even more promising imho.  You would most likely need to deal with the immune system, perhaps focusing genetic modification on the basis of cellular immunity to generate tolerance without compromising immune function. 

Already single cells have successfully been transplanted between species and lived as long as the new host.   And human animal chimera research is still undergoing

"They believe the animals, which if they had been carried to term would have developed a human internal organ, but would have looked and behaved like any other pig. The goal is that in the future, similar animals could potentially act as a ready source of organs for life-saving transplants.

To create the “chimeric” embryos, the scientists used a gene-editing technique known as Crispr to knock out a section of the pig’s DNA necessary for the embryo to develop a pancreas. 

Human induced pluripotent (iPS) stem cells were then injected into the pig embryo. These are cells that have the potential to develop into any tissue type in the resulting foetus. Although genetically foreign, they are not rejected by the pig embryo because its immune system has not yet developed."-source guardian

3d printing is probaby many many years probably decades away, human cloning is a no go, as even if you could develop brainless human clones the idea might be repulsive to most.   But seeing as animal suffering goes unnoticed at large, at least taking the lives of these animals can eventually be used to save lives rather than just providing pleasurable rack of ribs.  Hypothetically you could take stem cells from a patient, and transplant them into a suitably modified animal embryo, creating a custom made chimera with the specific organ or organs that the patient needs.   Being genetically identical to the patient there should be no need for immune suspression nor chance of rejection.   

While the article makes comments on possible pig brains being compromised by human stem cells, this can be avoided by the fact that not all genes expressed in the brain are expressed in every single organ.   If genes exclusively expressed by central nervous system cells but not by the desired organs are genetically knocked out, then no viable neural tissue can develop even if the stem cells contaminate the pig's central nervous system.  Organs that have some small amount of regulatory neural tissue, might or might not be too severely affected, and if they were viable solutions are likely possible.

As to vascular tissue, it could be made fully human, but we'd have to see what level of humanization is possible before complications arise with the mother animal's immune system, issues that might be resolved by interfering with such immune system.   Hypothetically so long as human neurons are not being created in the brain, the chimera can have the rest of the body human, assuming immune issues and other compatibility issues are taken care off, there'd be no ethical problems.  No ethical problems besides the killing of animals to harvest tissues, but that's no different than the ethical problem of killing animals to harvest their meat, an ethical problem to which many do not seem too concern themselves too much about.

Comment on living buildings and possible future synthetic biology tech

Yes lots of problems with the current approach. But someday in the future we might see true living buildings, where there are isolated locations that recycle wastes, and also separate energy collection and storage, self repairing and self modifying living walls.

Ideally you'd use synthetic biology to create a new type of multicellular organism, one that could take energy from the sun, from nuclear materials, from electricity, from the wind, and store it. Might be plant like, but with living 8k display covering all walls, perhaps even holographic. Could biosynthesize carbon nanotubes to strengthen the structure, and since it would exhibit negligible senescence the building could last for thousands or even millions of years. If it had advanced living computing, recycling and manufacturing facilities, technology and knowledge at the state of the art would be preserved even if most of the world was destroyed in some disaster.

With extremophile genes and the ability to build the right insulating and protective compounds, it could survive extreme temperature and even atmospheric variations, while keeping the internal areas human hospitable.

Able to repair, build up more of itself, and recycle, a small seedlike form of this could be sent to a planet like mars, and it would automatically and at virtually zero cost build by itself vast subterranean facilities all across mars, facilities that were human hospitable.- source next big future

cool biotech news

"Portable bioreactor from MIT produces medications, vaccines on-demandJuly 29, 2016 at 10:25 am

A new project from MIT and DARPA has demonstrated the ability to synthesize multiple medications on-demand and as-needed using yeast. The discovery could revolutionize our ability to deliver medications after natural disasters or to remote locations."-source extremetech