SPANISH RESEARCHERS WANT TO TAG HUMAN EMBRYOS WITH BAR CODES

 Barcoded from the beginning.....

Photo: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

FoxNews.com 

Dec 13, 2010

By Loren Grush

This is just too creepy for words. The possible abuses of such a scientific advancement are too many to name, leaving visions of Brave New World gestation rooms, walls lined with bottles of embryos.

In futuristic movies like “Aliens 2″ and “12 Monkeys,” prisoners are bar coded for easy identification. But today’s reality is even wilder: Scientists have proposed bar-coding embryos.

Scientists from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon.

The purpose of the system is to streamline in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures. If egg cells and embryos can be quickly and easily identified, then things should run much smoother, and success rates should be higher.This would avoid mismatches during in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures. 

The research, published online in Human Reproduction, represents a first step towards designing a direct labeling system of oocytes and embryos. The objective was to develop a system that minimizes risks when identifying female gametes and embryos during in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures, to reduce the phases of the clinical process requiring control and supervision by two embryologists.

Microscopic silicon codes, fabricated using microelectronic techniques, were employed in the research. In previous tests, researchers verified the innocuousness of silicon particles in human cells, particularly in macrophages.

The process involves injecting the bar codes, made from silicon, in the perivitelline space of embryos, the space between an embryo’s cell membrane and its protective outer cover, known as the zona pellucida. When the embryo attaches to the uterine wall, it frees itself from the zona pellucida, and the codes are meant to disappear right along with it, the researchers say.

But privacy experts and children’s rights advocates were instantly concerned by the concept of “direct labeling” of embryos, calling for transparency in the process.

“An embryo is a human life, so we have to move forward with this very, very cautiously,” Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum, told FoxNews.com. “Obviously we can’t ask the embryo what it wants, so the individual making the donation must consent to this as well as the individual receiving the donation. There’s got to be a lot of public discussion.”

The researchers insist that their technique is perfectly safe, claiming that the bar codes simply evaporate as the embryo develops into a fetus. Dr. Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said that as long as development is not affected, any improvement on embryo transfer would be extremely beneficial ~ since mistakes can be heartbreaking.

“When you’re talking about mismatch, those kinds of errors are psychologically and emotionally devastating,” Caplan told FoxNews.com. “You have parents who want to reject the child saying that the child clearly isn’t the same race as they are. There’s also a danger that the donor may change their mind and want to get involved in parenting. People really want that biological connection. So I think this is a terrific idea to reduce those difficulties.”

The bar codes aren’t hidden or concealed ~ in fact, they’re easily observed through a standard microscope, and the research team hopes to develop an automatic code reading system when they perfect their technique for labeling mouse embryos.

And once that’s done, testing on human embryos will begin.

“We’re very enthusiastic about it,” said Elena Ibáñez, one of the researchers for the project ~ a collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council. “It’s something that if it works out, it could be extremely helpful for embryologists. Right now, fertility clinics are simply labeling the Petri dish. We’re just making an improvement on that system,” she told FoxNews.com.

This final stage has proven to be the most difficult for the researchers to polish, however; they’d like to find a more efficient means of “stamping” the embryos.

“We see in the mice that some of the codes get attached to the embryo itself,” said Ibáñez. “So one of the things we’re trying next is to implant the code directly on the outside cover rather than inside of it. That way we’ll be 100 percent sure that the code doesn’t remain.”

If the research team wants to be able to make the leap from mice to humans, they’ll need to be certain that the code detaches. Dixon says that it would be a definite invasion of privacy if there were any indication that that the bar code would remain. She urged researchers to explore alternative means of identification before moving forward with this technique.

“The outcome of this isn’t necessarily going to be positive,” Dixon told FoxNews.com. “Just because it’s an advanced technology doesn’t mean it’s going to make things mistake-proof. I think there are other alternatives that are less invasive that can provide the same function. Plus I can see many women who would not wanted to be implanted with a bar-coded embryo.”

But Ibáñez assures that the procedure is perfectly safe and that no one should feel apprehensive about utilizing the new system.

“If there’s any concern that this could harm the embryo, remember that the silicon we use is completely harmless,” said Ibáñez. “The embryos develop normally and once we’ve perfected everything, they will lose the code after implantation,” she told FoxNews.com.

“So you won’t be producing a baby with code on it,” she said.

Researchers recently received authorization from the Department of Health of the Government of Catalonia to begin testing the system with human oocytes and embryos from several fertility clinics in Spain.

..... to the end.

TINY CONSPIRACIES: EARS TO BACTERIA

Bacteria communicate with chemical languages that allow them to synchronize their behavior and thereby act as multi-cellular organisms. This process, called quorum sensing, enables bacteria to do things they cant do as a single cell, like successfully infect and cause disease in humans. 

"Itty bitty little critters" Bassler refers to bacteria as. Very very interesting stuff. It is also a wonderful detailed exposure if you exchange the word "parasite" for "bacteria" for indeed, the two are closely connected.

Bonnie Bassler, Ph.D., the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and President-elect for the American Society for Microbiology, has been researching strategies that can interfere with quorum sensing and will hopefully yield novel antibiotics to prevent disease. 

This is the full presentation Dr. Bassler gave at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, D.C. on June 18, 2009. Not only does Dr. Bassler explain the mechanisms of bacterial communication, but she also puts forth her theories on how we can disrupt this communication for human benefit. 

By MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY

Scientific American

February, 2004

It is far too early in the morning, and Bonnie L. Bassler is charging across the Princeton University campus, incandescent purple coat flying, brown curls bouncing, big laugh booming. She has come directly from the aerobics class she teaches every morning at 6:15 ~ “I get up at exactly 5:42, not a minute earlier, not a minute later,” she says emphatically. She says most things with similar energy, and when the conversation turns to her work, she becomes, impossibly, even more dynamic. 

“I am not meant to be stopped in time,” she laughs. 

“I am supposed to be a blur.”

The 41-year-old Bassler ~ a professor of molecular biology, winner of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation genius award, and occasional actress, dancer and singer ~ studies bacteria and how they communicate among their own kind and with other species. Quorum sensing, as this phenomenon is called, is a young science.

Until recently, no one thought bacteria talked to one another, let alone in ways that changed their behavior,  and Bassler has been instrumental in the field’s rapid ascension. She has figured out some of the dialects ~ the genetic and molecular mechanisms different species use ~ but is best known for identifying what might be a universal language all species share, something she has jokingly referred to as “bacterial Esperanto.”
 

As its moniker suggests, quorum sensing describes the ways in which bacteria determine how many of them there are in the vicinity. If enough are present (a quorum), they can get down to business or up to mischief. 

For instance, millions of bioluminescent bacteria might decide to emit light simultaneously so that their host, a squid, can glow ~ perhaps to distract predators and escape. 

Or salmonella bacteria might wait until their hordes have amassed before releasing a toxin to sicken their host; if the bacteria had acted as independent assassins rather than as an army, the immune system most likely would have wiped them out. 

Researchers have shown that bacteria also use quorum sensing to form the slimy biofilms that cover your teeth and eat through ship hulls and to regulate reproduction and the formation of spores.

If it all holds up, the implications are enormous. Quorum sensing offers a way to think about evolution.

Perhaps early bacteria communicated, then organized themselves according to different functions and,  ultimately, into complex organisms. More practically, quorum sensing provides a strategy for medicine: muck up the communication system of dangerous bacteria, such as antibiotic-resistant enterococcus, and perhaps the bugs can’t so effectively orchestrate their assault.

As Bassler puts it, “You can either make them deaf or you can make them mute.”
 

The study of quorum sensing has its roots in the late 1960s. Two scientists ~ J. Woodland Hastings and Kenneth H. Nealson ~ discovered that a marine bacterium, Vibrio fischeri, produced light when its population reached a critical size. When fewer were present, the bacteria didn’t bioluminesce. 

The two researchers speculated that the bacteria released a signal ~ something they called an autoinducer ~ that cried out, like Horton the elephant’s dust speck in the Dr. Seuss book, “We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!” When the cacophony became loud enough, the assemblage glowed.

In 1983 Michael R. Silverman, then at the Agouron Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and a colleague identified the genes for V. fischeri’s autoinducer and its receptor.Bassler came to work with Silverman in 1990, after  finishing her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. She decided to focus on another glowing marine bacterium, V. harveyi, to determine whether its signaling system was similar.

She got to work making mutant bacteria ~ disabling a gene here, a gene there, to see if she could impair the one that triggered the bug to bioluminesce when it was in like company. 

“You turn off the lights in the room and just look for the ones that are dark when they should be bright or bright when they should be dark. It is genetics for morons,” she quips. Bassler found the genes for V. harveyi’s autoinducer and its receptor.

She also discovered something surprising. If she knocked out those two genes and put the altered V. harveyi in mixed company ~ that is, around masses of different species of bacteria ~ it glowed. “So I knew there was a second system,” Bassler remarks. Bacteria “don’t have enough room in their genome to be stupid, so there had to be a separate purpose for this system.”

The foreign bacteria were emitting something that V. harveyi responded to. Bassler called that something autoinducer two (AI-2). In 1994, as the field of quorum sensing was coming alive, Bassler moved to Princeton. Over time, she and others showed that quorum sensing initiates the release of toxins by bacteria such as V. cholerae. And they found that every bacterium they tested has its own personal autoinducer, the one it uses to communicate with its own kind. 

Gram-negative bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa use different versions of AHL molecules (acylated homoserine lactones); gram-positive bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus use peptides. But most bacteria Bassler looked at also used AI-2. By 1997 “we could see that all these bacteria made this molecule and that it was not just weird, crazy bacteria from the ocean,” Bassler recalls. “So we got the idea that the bacteria must have a way of knowing self from other.”

For Bassler, the idea that different bacteria chat makes perfect sense. “There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning, and they are in exactly  the same structure every single time: this guy is next to that one, is next to that one,” she says. “It just seemed to us that you can’t do that if the only thing you can detect is yourself. You have to know ‘other.’” 

Bassler and her students set out to purify and characterize AI-2. Finally, through the efforts of postdoctoral student Stephan Schauder and the crystallography of Frederick M. Hughson and Xin Chen, they got it. AI-2 is an unusual package ` a sugar with a boron sitting in the middle of it. “What is amazing about that molecule is that it is the first ever to have a biological function for boron. Ever!” Bassler exclaims. 

Now Bassler and her colleagues are trying to determine whether AI-2 is, indeed, one molecule that works alone as a signal and does not combine with other molecules to give rise to slightly different “languages.” If it is the latter, no more Esperanto.

“Her work has been truly superb,” comment microbiologist Richard P. Novick of New York University. “But there is argument about where [AI-2] comes from and why. And what role it plays in different systems is unclear.”

Some scientists are also concerned that aspects of quorum  sensing ~ but not Bassler’s findings ~ have been slightly overinterpreted. 

“Do bacteria want to communicate with each other, or is it just by accident?” asks Stephen C. Winans, a microbiologist at Cornell University. “This idea has taken hold that these bacteria want to communicate with each other. It may be just too good to be true.”

Bassler’s drive ~ her friend and former mentor Silverman describes her as “intensely motivated,” “on a quest” and “just fierce” ~ suggests that she will hear bacteria’s every last word. For the time being, she remains focused on understanding AI-2. “I want it all to be one thing, so I am sure that is wrong,” she says.

“I want it to be one thing because that is better if you want to make a drug, right?” Bassler is one of several quorum-sensing researchers working with companies to develop drugs. In 1999 she formed a company called Quorex with a former colleague from Agouron. Although her involvement is limited at the moment, she is hopeful that the start-up will find new antibacterials.

“This was really considered fringe science,” Bassler says. “Now it is this amazing field that didn’t even exist 10 years ago.”