interesting crowdfunding projects

[Reason]

The Lifespan.io crowdfunding site has a mitochondrial allotopic
expression project currently funded and in the final days that you might
find interesting. It seems like something that - aside from the cost of
reagents - is within the capabilities of many of the more capable folk
in the DIYbio community. The details are certainly worth a read:

https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-mitochondrial-repair-project/

The reagent cost issue is kind of an interesting one for DIYbio. The
community has made some inroads into address the basic equipment cost,
might it also at some point tackle reagents? Or is this something where
the path of least resistance is just to wait, expecting the cost
implosion for biotechnology to reach these areas as well sooner or later?

Another quite fascinating project is the attempt to kick DRACO
anti-virus research across the finish line; it is a way to treat near
all viruses by killing the cells they replicate in. The inefficiencies
in progress are occasionally puzzling; DRACO has solid studies backing
it, and a near complete lack of interest from the development community.
It is also something where some parts of the work taken in isolation are
projects that could in theory be replicated in the DIYbio community, out
of interest or curiosity.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-end-viral-diseases-with-dracos#/

Lastly I'm raising funds for SENS research again this year: a group of
us created a $125,000 matching fund and we will match all donations made
to the SENS Research Foundation before the end of the year:

https://www.fightaging.org/fund-research/

SENS research has had a banner year this year. Oisin Biotechnology has
been seed funded to develop a means of senescent cell clearance, another
group demonstrated proof of principle senescent cell clearance and
corresponding health improvements in mice, Human Rejuvenation
Technologies was founded to develop lysosomal aggregate clearing enzymes
as a therapy, a method of synthesizing glucosepane was published in
Science, Gensight has raised a boatload of money for their allotopic
expression work, and in general things are starting to happen as a
consequence of past years of philanthropy.

Reason

[Dennis Oleksyuk]

Longevity related research is definitely something very interesting.

But it indeed would require more capable folks. It seems that both of these projects involve work with mammalian and eventually human cells, and viruses. Which in turn requires skills for working with cell cultures and probably BSL-2 facilities. Which out of reach of majority of DYIBio communities and individuals.

On the other side, it would be great if these approaches could be replicated in yeast or other simple organism. Do you know if any of these techniques had early proof-of-concepts in non-mammalian cells?

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[Reason]

Allotopic expression in yeast is indeed a thing, and is still going on
as a tool for certain types of investigation. E.g.:

-
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002876
- http://www.pnas.org/content/107/11/5047.full
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0076687996640361

I'm not so familiar with the early DRACO work, what I see starts with
mammalian cell studies.

Reason

[Koeng]

I personally don't believe that they will be able to import all the genes efficiently... Currently, there are 2 theories of why the mitochondria still have genes: for regulation purposes (such as in yeast atp synthase is only synthesized when the rotor portion is nearby) and for hydrophobicity. In yeast, they've actually tried recoding the genes and putting them in the genome, and I forgot which ones didn't work, but I know that Var1 (part of the mito ribosome) did work. In fact, when you express cox1 (mitochondrial gene) under the Var1 promoter and terminator, you don't get any complementation of activity (although you DO get protein, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9755179 ). Mitochondrial genes are tricky and we don't know a whole lot about them. 

To get around the hydrophobicity problem, you could always use RNA import and translation there. However, scientists have yet to get expression of any genes ( http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(10)00725-7 ), showing a distinct problem with the regulation problem. 

Personally I, and I may be wrong, believe that two of the best things we could do is 1: augment DNA repair in the mitochondria or 2: import DNA to repair mutations from the nucleus. Right now I'm working on the latter, so I may have some bias towards that, but I'm not doing it for anything related to aging. 

Anyway, still very interesting research! Thanks for sharing the project

-Koeng

[Pieter]

seriously guys, is dr Rider an actor or a scientist? this is hilarious and dreadful at the same time. Who came up with the story board and music for this video? And what's up with the DNA tie, really this is comedy. Is this for real?

[Meredith L. Patterson]

Another crowdfunded project I just stumbled across: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dracos-may-be-effective-against-all-viruses

Cheers,

--mlp

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