The National Park College (NPC) Math and Sciences Division First Friday Lunch and Lecture Series featured Dr. Tsunemi Yamashita, genetic engineering expert and professor of Biology at Arkansas Tech University (ATU).
Yamashita works in the Department of Biology at Arkansas Tech University (ATU) where he focuses his research on the scorpion population concerning their genetics and venom evolution. Yamashita spoke about genetic engineering and the applications to agriculture and medicine.
He shared with the audience how corn is the most genetically modified food source. Seed from a plant should be easily spread but corn must be manually picked and spread. This modification, stripping the kernel to reseed, is technically genetic modification. The mustard root is an ancestor of the brussel sprout, broccoli, and cabbage. There is an idea in the science field that in the future medicines may be added to plants ending the need for pills or injections.
Yamashita also spoke about CRISPR, Cluster Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. This technology has been in existence for about ten years. CRISPR is a gene editing technology and is considered one of the biggest biological breakthroughs since Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). CRISPR allows the use a system to cut and paste DNA at a specific location. The guide RNA directs a protein, CAS9, to a specific location targeting very specific genes. CRISPR is commonly referred to as “gene editing” or “gene hacking” by the scientific community and is useful because of its ease of use. Some fear CRISPR is potentially dangerous because it is simple enough for those with little biology experience to use in a home laboratory.
A member of the audience asked Yamashita if the alterations created by CRISPR could lead to defective mutations. Yamashita responded by stating “Yes, nothing that humans do is foolproof. There is a concern that it…could cause a defect somewhere else.” One application would be the treatment of Sickle Cell Anemia. “They would rather do this by taking adult cells, insert a gene such as the one that is responsible for proper hemoglobin production to correct Sickle Cell,” he said. Yamashita explained that this would be done by taking stem cells from the marrow of an affected individual, fixing the gene, and then inserting it back into the gene sequence. The thought is that this would produce enough of the protein so that a percentage of cells would be fairly normal and would not create any negative effect to the individual.
