Scientists can now test the effects of thousands of genes in a single fell swoop.
New kinds of research can be done in animal models thanks to a new technique developed by the University of Oregon. Biologists will be able to do experiments that compare many versions of a gene, hunt for changes that lead to specific traits and track their evolution over time.
Such research is often the first step in unraveling the causes of human diseases.
This is the first time it has been done on this scale in an animal.
A lot of time is spent working with genetics. In animals, we're limited by how many genes we can make at a time. This is a way to get around the problem.
They describe their new technique in a preprint.
The system has been piloted in a worm. A similar approach could be used in other lab animals.
Genetics has served as the basis of the revolution in biotechnology over the last three decades, but it has been difficult to do at scale within animal systems. The new approach developed in our lab can serve as a platform for a whole new way of using a simple animal as the basis for synthetic biology in the same way thatbacteria and yeast have been used for a long time.
There are many reasons for scientists to be able to make many genetic changes at once. They might be looking for a way to make an animal resistant to a particular drug or less susceptible to a disease. They might need to screen hundreds or even thousands of possible variations on a gene to find the one that works best.
Animals take a long time in these kinds of experiments. Each strain must be individually engineered. It takes between seven to ten hours of hands-on time to make a single Mutant. Tens of thousands can be made using this new system.
The way to speed things up was designed by Stevenson and his colleagues. The books in the library are meaningless and non-functional. There is an engineered gap in the genes that are being targeted.
Instead of injecting many individual worms with different versions of a gene, researchers can inject the entire library into one worm.
The library expands when the worms reproduce. Each child gets a randomly selected book from the library to complete their genes. The genes are active when a segment from the library slides in.
A group of worms all have different genetic quirks.
The researchers named their technique after Dr. Who. Transgenic Arrays Resulting in Diversity of Integrated Sequences is what it is called here. Stevenson says that the worm is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. It has a lot of genetic material.
The worms had a gene that gave them resistance to antibiotics. There are broad applications for biology in general.
Stephen Banse, a research professor at the UO, believes that it could be useful for studying interactions between cells. Scientists lose context by studying these interactions in yeast orbacteria. We can do these things in a model.
There is more information about the High- Throughput Library Transgenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans. There is a book titled "10101/2022.10.30.514301".
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