indbiohub

Towards a genomics revolution India has the scientic resources for genetic research — all it needs is the vision at the national level to leverage them I n 1865, Gregor Mendel discovered the two laws of inheritance that are now named after him. Almost 90 years later in 1953, the work of James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, deciphered the structure of the molecule — DNA — that stores our hereditary information and gets transmitted from parents to children over generations. Personalised medicine At this point, in principle, the prospect of building individualised medicine based  on the precise information stored in each human’s DNA (their genome) had come into view. But the human genome has around 3 billion base pairs and in 1953 it wasn’t possible to imagine extracting genetic information on the molecular scale and of this collective size.  Technological advances in sequencing methods have made the possibility glimpsed 60 years ago a reality 

A pioneer in biotechnology Har Gobind Khorana is credited with making the first synthetic genes by cutting and pasting DNA bits Jacob Koshy Who was Har Gobind Khorana? Nobel Laureate Har Gobind Khorana’s contributions to biology are of contemporary relevance for some of the most exciting areas such as synthetic biology and gene editing. A Google Doodle on Tuesday to mark the 96th birth anniversary of the Indianorigin American scientist this week stoked much interest in his work.   What were his contributions to biology? After James Watson and Francis Crick found that DNA (De­oxy ribonucleic acid) had a double­helix structure, Khorana was among those who signi­ cantly built on that knowledge and explained how this sequence of nucleic acids (better known as the genetic code) goes about making proteins, which is critical to the functioning of cells. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1968 was awarded jointly to Robert W. Holley, Har Gobind Khorana and Marsh

An all in-one-pot approach to gene synthesis There's a new and much improved plotfrom that synthesis gene a method called Dryosynth could pave  the way to easier contribution of low cost large scale synthetic gene libraries, overcome the need for specialized devices or industrial-level facilities.  Dryosynth can now successfully build more than 7000 different version of synthetic gene that encode two essential proteins in the bacteria Escherichia coil . the quest to scale up technologies that synthesise structure of DNA (or oligonucletides ) in recent years has led to a greater demand for techniques that assembly synthetic oligonucletides into large genes that encoded proteins of interest. Source: The Hindu news paper

Expanding the donor pool Indian scientists develop mechanism to rejuvenate aged stem cells I n cases such as bone marrow transplantation, which involves the transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells, namely  stem cells that give rise to other  types of blood cells, a younger donor age results in a  better outcome. A group of  Indian scientists have now  developed a mechanism  that can rejuvenate stem  cells from older donors,  making them useful for  transplantation. The mechanism development by researchers at the  National Centre for Cell  Science (NCCS), Pune, involves rejuvenating aged  hematopoietic stem cells in  a short­term culture using micro­vesicles secreted by  young stromal cells.  This approach, they hope, will expand donor  cohort. The fnding has relevance in clinical bone­marrow transplantation, wherein  aged donors are  usually not preferred as  their stem cells could have  compromised engraftment  ability due to ageing. With the new mechanism, it  migh