Phys (November 10, 2020) Flaws emerge in modeling human genetic diseases in animals Retrieved November 12, 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-11-flaws-emerge-human-genetic-diseases.html 

 

At the University of California Keck School of medicine, zebrafish are being genetically engineered to model human birth defects. Often, when there is a disease-causing mutation found in humans, scientists will engineer the same mutation into the genomes of lab animals. By doing so, offspring are created with the same appearance and defects as those found in humans. The zebrafish have some similar backbone structure, several organs, as well as many genes. Advances in science, such as the CRISPR-based molecular scissors have allowed scientists to change genes and use other chemicals to silence certain genes. The entire process of using the molecular scissors, monitoring the gene mutations in embryos, and breeding these fish to study defects in the next generation can take over a year. In this study, there have been attempts at shortening the labs. For example, some have injected large amounts of CRISPR-based molecular scissors and look for the defects in the same organism. This is an issue because the cells in the animals injected with CRISPR-based molecular scissors have not all changed in the same way.

I understand that the process of these studies can be long, however, I believe studies such as genetic engineering and defects should not be rushed. Although some data and research may be received faster, it does not always mean that it will be accurate. The invalid data has caused me to question the credibility of other labs that have used “shortcuts”. The ultimate goal of these experiments is to further understand the human body, and successfully engineer other organisms. It is not an easy task to engineer these organisms to resemble human defects, so each step in this research should be done precisely and take as much time as necessary. In the future, scientists should definitely be more careful and take their time to complete labs such as these. By trying to make shortcuts, environmental resources such as these fish and chemicals have now been altered/used in non-beneficial ways.