From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 13:45:59 MDT
On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> Even if your cyt b gene is transferred to the
> nucleus (as happened many times, even in humans, as shown by nuclear mito
> pseudogenes), it will be transcribed into a non-functional protein because
> the interpreting machinery (the tRNA code) is different.
Good point. I may have once been aware of this but didn't
take it into account until you and Aubrey mentioned it.
This is one of the reasons one needs to make genetic engineering
cheap. If one could drop the costs of fixing this to the "no-brainer"
level (which I think one can). Then people would be more inclined
to test various solutions. Since we have a fair amount of knowledge
now about how EBV maintains itself within cells but not integrated
into the chromosomes we have a gene therapy strategy that could
completely avoid the problem of integration into the wrong place
in the standard chromosome set (something that may now be
slowing down gene therapy trials).
So one could design an additional chromosome based on EBV where
all (most?) of the EBV genes are replaced with recoded mito genes.
Then one extracts the most primitive stem cells one can find
in the body, infects them with the anti-aging EBV-based therapy
vector then amplifies the # you have and puts the modified stem
cells back into the body.
Robert
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