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azuth89 t1_ivfglx7 wrote

The vast majority of our genome is identical. Heck we share 44% of our DNA with a banana, with another person it's nearly 100.

Mapping disparate individuals allows us to try and connect their traits to specific bits of the remaining, variable portions of the genome. It will also help us define what is dictated by genes, what is a genetic propensity which may or may not be activated by environmental factors or behaviors and what is purely environmental.

Once that's done, we can predict a wide variety of factors. Risk factors for various diseases and disorders are of most interest now, but this will inevitably lead to identifying other factors. Once those are identified the inevitable endpoint is editing. First to remove defects like a propensity to say...diabetes, heart failure or even something more minor like myopia but once we start down that road the line between removing risk factors and adding desirable ones is real blurry.

Fully mapping a genome is incredibly labor intensive, but the sample size will increase over time to enable this sort of thing and these initial mappings do a lot to determine what we need to investigate and what can be mostly ignored as the common background to humans.

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E_B_Jamisen t1_ivfw1kv wrote

what kind of changes can we expect to see? like in a few hundred years, will we be able to change the DNA so someone has gills or 4 arms? or is the extent going to be "you arent lactose intolerant"?

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azuth89 t1_ivg1c4j wrote

A good example would be to look at modern GMO crops. GMO or otherwise fruit is fruit, veg is veg but they're able to play a bit with size, disease resistance, need for certain nutrients from the environment. They're able to play with size and growth rate within a limit IF the GMO gets the right rnviroent to support it. Lots of little tweaks like that.

Optimization and removing/reducing weaknesses is certainly possible, superpowers involving a whole different body plan like gills or 4 arms, not so much.

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PurpleSunCraze t1_ivgmbdd wrote

Is it “it may be possible but the tech isn’t there” or “fundamentally, it is not possible”?

I’ve seen these type of questions in regards to someday the possibility of genetic manipulation to the point of having a human go through a completely, biological sex change, you think that will remain in the realm of sci-fi forever? For the stuff we can change now, is it a slow, glacial process for the change, or in the case of my question, 30 minutes of the worst pain ever felt by a human being?

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newappeal t1_ivosk9i wrote

Every organism that exists or ever existed came to be through the interaction of its genome and its environment, which is essentially a huge complex of chemical reactions. So if you can edit genomes and control an organism's local environment (both possible), then you can produce at least anything that has existed and unfathomably many things that don't. That doesn't mean literally anything imaginable, but it does mean many, many things.

However, the ability to grow organisms with arbitrary characteristics requires biochemical knowledge far beyond what we have now. The technical limitations we currently face are nothing compared to the knowledge gap.

Moreover, the hypothetical scenario I'm talking about here involves creating an artificial genome in an artificial cell and then growing a macroscopic organism with an arbitrary body plan from it. That's theoretically possible, for sure, because it happens literally all the time in natural contexts.

But what you're describing with this hypothetical full-body genetic-level sex change of an adult human doesn't really make sense from a technical perspective. I mean, sure, it's theoretically possible to completely deconstruct a human body to the molecular level and then construct a new one, but that has nothing to do with genetic engineering. Remember that we're not talking about growing an organism from a single germline cell in this case - we're talking about restructuring every single somatic cell in a fully-developed organism. The composition and structure of tissues and organs are not determined by their cells' current genetic makeup (even if we include epigenetics); rather, they are the result of biochemical changes across their entire genetic history. Simply swapping out every single cell's DNA in an organism (even if we could do that) would not cause the organism to suddenly transform into the organism it would have been if it had had that genome from the start.

Here's an analogy: If you change the blueprints of a house before the house is built, then you change the house. But if you change the blueprints after construction, the house doesn't change. All you would do is cause problems for anyone who wanted to repair or remodel the house, because the plans wouldn't match the actual house. Can you tear down the house and rebuild it a different way? Sure. But that's a fundamentally different process.

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silent_cat t1_ivkf0db wrote

> Is it “it may be possible but the tech isn’t there” or “fundamentally, it is not possible”?

For a god it may be possible, for us, not so much. For comparison it's like modifying a program in a language we don't understand. This program has grown randomly over aeons and the strangest things relate to each other. You're basically stuck with randomly changing things and seeing what happens. But since people mature so slowly that's very slow progress.

During the maturation process of a foetus, there's lots of little tripwires to abort if something weird is going on.

That said, if you find some baby born with gill like structures or four arms, if you sequence them you might get a head start. But the slow testing phase will be a problem.

Evil science fiction villain mode: unless of course we figure out how to grow foetuses into babies without a woman being involved, you could build a factory to test 100,000 variations all at once. That would speed it up a bit.

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Dont____Panic t1_ivg6k6n wrote

Some genetic manipulation can do things like turn hair into feathers and fingernails into scales, so that is possible, although it would be enormously unethical in humans.

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HaV1nG15sueS t1_ivhf698 wrote

One of the more recent hot topics is CRISPR gene editing, which looks quite promising. Give it a look

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turgidNtremulous t1_ivlj2nn wrote

It's worth pointing out that in humans, the jaw and (I believe) parts of the inner ear are derived from the same embryonic structures that turn into gills in fish. So, in a sense, you do have gills.

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RebelClown86 t1_ivgjtaf wrote

So why is so much of our genome identical? I've always that a lot of our DNA is inert, so I would expect that to have accrued mutations over time. Is that not the case?

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Career_Secure t1_ivgxyaj wrote

Probably because of the small population of people that today’s world population descends from, and the fact that mutation possibilities that are lethal or highly disadvantageous to survival don’t persist and are by default ruled out (core/important regions stay conserved between people).

The idea that a lot of our DNA is inert stems from when the human genome was sequenced, and they found out only a small percent of it codes for genes that go on to get translated into proteins. But, over time, scientists are finding that these non-coding regions of DNA don’t do nothing; in fact, they play many biological roles in regulating the expression of protein-coding genes and can have significant physiological impacts and relevance.

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