HowardHughesMedicalInstitute
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CRISPR editing may help turn a wild berry into a farmable crop
It can take many years to make a wild plant easy to farm, but gene editing could make that happen for one fruit in record time. Scientists have used genomics and CRISPR gene editing to develop a technique that could domesticate the groundcherry, a wild fruit that's tasty and drought-resistant but difficult to grow in significant volumes. After sequencing the groundcherry's genome, the team both tweaked CRISPR to work with the plant and pinpointed the genes that led to its less-than-pleasant traits, such as its small size and not-so-plentiful flowering. From there, they just had to 'fix' the fruit with gene edits that promoted the qualities they wanted.
A drop of blood reveals almost every virus you've ever met
This stock image is just for illustration, you do not need this much blood to take the new test. Every disease that you've ever encountered is cataloged within your DNA, and now a team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has worked out how to access that data. It's part of a project called VirScan that, it's hoped, will revolutionize medical testing and help Doctors catch illnesses long before they manifest. Even better, is that it's not even an expensive procedure, with each test slated to cost just $25 -- well, at least before your hospital slaps on their own fee on top.
Alt-week 9.29.12: 3D pictures of the moon, 4D clocks and laser-controlled worms
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Dimensions, they're like buses. You wait for ages, and then three come along at once. And then another one right after that. While that might be about where the analogy ends, this week sees us off to the moon, where we then leap from the third, right into the fourth. Once there, we'll learn how we could eventually be controlled by lasers, before getting up close and personal with a 300 million-year old bug. Sound like some sort of psychedelic dream? Better than that, this is alt-week.
