Aren’t most parts of the body expressing transposons? Seems like not the right thing to alert our immune system to.
Not a biologist, but I assumed we’d need to alter lots of cells—either to produce something that interferes with transposons like RNAi, or to break them with direct gene editing.
In humans not all genes are expressed at every moment in time. Parts of the DNA are methylated which prevents them from being read. If the gene PGDBD5 stops being methylated it starts cutting DNA randomly. At the beginning this might still be repaired, but sometimes the PGDBD5 gene manages to copy itself and then you get even more of the protein. This dynamic from PGDBD5 alone might be responsible for the majority of children who die due to cancer.
If a transposon is setup in a way that leads to constant copying then that kills of the host lineage. The evolutionary pressure for transposons is to be active enough to copy themselves often enough to not be removed from the lineage while at the same time not copying enough to kill of the lineage.
PGDBD5 does get expressed in some cells of people who don’t have any illness symptoms but it’s unclear whether the underlying cells are simply disfunction in which case it would be worthwhile to kill them early or whether they have a valid reason.
Aren’t most parts of the body expressing transposons? Seems like not the right thing to alert our immune system to.
Not a biologist, but I assumed we’d need to alter lots of cells—either to produce something that interferes with transposons like RNAi, or to break them with direct gene editing.
In humans not all genes are expressed at every moment in time. Parts of the DNA are methylated which prevents them from being read. If the gene PGDBD5 stops being methylated it starts cutting DNA randomly. At the beginning this might still be repaired, but sometimes the PGDBD5 gene manages to copy itself and then you get even more of the protein. This dynamic from PGDBD5 alone might be responsible for the majority of children who die due to cancer.
If a transposon is setup in a way that leads to constant copying then that kills of the host lineage. The evolutionary pressure for transposons is to be active enough to copy themselves often enough to not be removed from the lineage while at the same time not copying enough to kill of the lineage.
PGDBD5 does get expressed in some cells of people who don’t have any illness symptoms but it’s unclear whether the underlying cells are simply disfunction in which case it would be worthwhile to kill them early or whether they have a valid reason.