BY KIM BELLARD
Normally I write about issues the place I see some surprising parallel to healthcare, or one thing simply amazed me, or outraged me (there are many issues about healthcare just like the latter). However generally I run throughout one thing that simply delights me.
So once I inexplicably stumbled throughout DNA Barcoding Technology for High Throughput Cell-Nanoparticle Study, by Andy Tay, PhD, my first thought was, oh, nanoparticles, that’s all the time fascinating, then it hit me: wait, DNA has barcodes?
How pleasant.
We’re all used to barcodes. Just about each product in just about each retailer has a barcode. The barcode was invented in the late 1940’s, however didn’t actually take off in reputation till the UPC (Common Product Code) barcode. A Marsh’s Grocery store in Troy, Ohio, in 1974 was the primary grocery merchandise scanned (a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum, in case you are ). The UPC barcode encodes the Producer of the product, and the product code.
The now nearly as ubiquitous QR codes are, primarily, two dimensional barcodes. Accordingly, they’ll retailer considerably extra data.
However again to DNA barcodes. The principle function is, as you would possibly guess from the identify, is to have a standardized method to uniquely establish species, primarily based on their DNA (consider species because the “product”). The strategies had been first proposed in 2003, by Paul D N Herbert, et alia, and shortly gained traction.
Guo, et. alia, describes DNA barcoding as follows:
DNA barcode is a number of quick gene sequences (usually 200–900 base pairs) taken from a standardized portion of the genome to help species identification and discovery by using sequence divergence primarily based on nucleotide alignment (Emerson et al. 2011; Hebert et al. 2003a, 2004). Thus, the elemental operate of this genetic instrument seeks to match barcode sequences to reference databases to effectively and successfully assign any organic pattern to its species whatever the visible classification of the pattern.
There are databases of DNA barcodes for quite a lot of life types, together with crops, animals, and/or fungi; these embody the BOLD system (Barcode of Life Information system), Unite, Diat.barcode, and iBOL (worldwide E book of Life).
In contrast to, say, UPC codes, which might be merely assigned, there’s not a common method to determine which DNA sequences can be utilized to barcode an organism, and nice care should be taken to extract and analyze it. To complicate issues additional, there are mini-barcodes and meta-barcodes. I’ll go away it as an train for the very reader to study extra about precisely how all that’s accomplished; for my functions, it might as properly simply be magic.
DNA barcodes permit us to take a look at a comparatively modest DNA sequence and decide what species it belongs to, which is a superb assist if one is figuring out new species or making an attempt to do an evaluation of an ecosystem. For instance, college students from a set of fifty faculties in Australia collected some 14,000 specimens, submitted 12,500 new DNA barcodes to BOLD – 3,000 of which had been fully new. Undertaking lead Dr Erinn Fagan-Jeffries said: “It’s extremely probably that every one contributing faculties have discovered species new to Western science which is admittedly thrilling.”
Lest you assume that every one DNA barcodes are good for are identification of species, researchers at the Garvin Institute of Medical Research barcoded cancer cells, in an effort to perceive which of them had been evading the immune system response and immunotherapies. “We confirmed that there are uncommon most cancers cells able to escaping the immune system and escaping remedy with immunotherapy,” mentioned first writer Louise Baldwin.
The researchers imagine that “the mechanisms may very well be used as potential targets for therapies, to cease tumorous cells from adapting and spreading. One other future utility may very well be in prognosis, the place a excessive variety of cells may point out which sufferers may not reply to immunotherapy.”
Not unhealthy for a barcode.
Again to the nanoparticles. Dr. Tay says: “Lately, DNA barcoding applied sciences have been utilized to generate barcoded cells and nanoparticles to analyze heterogeneous cell-nanoparticle interactions to spice up the translational utility of nanomedicine.” The brand new methods allow “tens of millions of cells to be tracked over developmental and evolutionary time scales and to report mobile options in response to stimuli, together with nanomedicine.”
Dr. Tay factors to research by Boehnke, et. al. that “made use of barcoded cell strains to find cell and nanoparticle options to spice up nanomedicine supply.” These and different new methods made it simpler and sooner to grasp which nanoparticle formulations are having the specified results.
I imply, actually, is something cooler than injecting DNA barcodes into nanoparticles to assist obtain scientific outcomes? That’s some actual 21st century drugs.
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We’re DNA creatures. All life that we all know are primarily based on DNA, and it’s not clear to me that we’d even acknowledge an organism primarily based on anything as life. Barcodes usually are not DNA’s solely wonderful trick. It’s the nonpareil storage device; sometime all our storage wants could also be met utilizing DNA (sure, I do know, some argue to diamonds as the storage medium, however, actually, DNA is means cooler). As Zhang, et. al. noted earlier this year, “DNA has emerged as a strong substrate for programming data processing machines on the nanoscale.”
There ae going to be DNA/RNA computers, DNA neural networks/AI, and DNA robots. Who is aware of what else?
Given all that, I’m nonetheless holding out hope that we’ll sometime have a DNA EHR, with each the processing accomplished in DNA and the information saved in DNA, and that we retailer all that in our personal DNA. Inform me that’s not one thing {that a} customer from the 22nd century wouldn’t respect.
There’s a complete physique of labor in data principle/mathematical logic concerning the shortest method to outline statements, numbers, and so on. DNA barcodes could do properly at extra merely describing species, however I don’t know that we couldn’t every have a novel DNA barcode – shorter than our complete genome – that may very well be used for a lot of purposes.
Our world can be a lot completely different with out UPC barcodes, QR codes, and computer systems primarily based on silicon chips, however that’s all so 20th century. Within the 21st century, we higher be getting used to extra methods we will use DNA.
DNA barcodes — pleasant, certainly.
Kim is a former emarketing exec at a significant Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now common THCB contributor.
