Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

CRISPR sounds like a snack product or a drawer in the fridge. But it’s an emerging field of genetic research, an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

It’s tempting to guess that such fields of study are based on our natural curiosity, the endless quest to find out how things work or why things happen, with a vague hope of finding a useful application of the knowledge gained.  But in this new area of research there are known applications, going in.

The aim is to discover the molecular machinery used by bacteria to detect invading viruses and destroy them.

It’s easy to think of bacteria as enemies, nasty life forms that cause disease, agents of harmful infection, the targets of antibiotics. And it is true that some bacteria are harmful to us. But it’s also true, and beginning to be accepted by the public at large, that we can’t live without them, and that there are bacteria that we rely on to assist us with such important tasks as digesting food.

In CRISPR the researchers look at what we have in common with bacteria, in being attacked by viruses, and at defenses bacteria use to repel virus attacks. Maybe the same tactics can be used by us humes, to keep viruses at bay.

Also, since gene tinkering is involved, maybe CRISPR research can assist in battles against genetic disorders.

There exist more viruses attacking bacteria than any other biological agents known. They outnumber target bacteria 10 to 1, according to Blake Wiedenheft of Montana State University’s Department of Microbiology and Microbiology.

Wiedenheft explains that bacteria have evolved to equip themselves with sophisticated immune systems to battle viruses. The researchers have created a blueprint of the molecular surveillance bacteria use to detect viruses.

The detection system looks for a repetitive chunk of DNA in the bacterial genome. A pattern. The palindromic aspect means that some patterns contain same-in-both-directions sequences.

You know, sequences that are analogs for such word fun statements as “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” which mirrors from the r in “ere,” or “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama,” with c as its hinge.

The CRISPR researchers talk about a “biological machine,” which, when all its parts function together according to the blueprint, efficiently identifies viral DNA when it invades a cell.

The researchers are using x-ray crystallography, and x-ray diffraction data from synchrotron radiation sources in Berkeley, Chicago and Stanford research centers.

Interpreting the x-ray diffraction patterns requires mathematical analysis at a level where few people on the planet can function.

The hope is that through CRISPR, scientists can find a way to repurpose bacteria’s viral defenses to cut viral DNA out of human cells.

Wo! Think of that revolution in battling disease! It boggles the mind.

Biotechnology. Programmable nuclei (molecular scissors). Altering DNA sequences of almost any cell type. Repairing genetic defects in humans and in other creatures. The possibilities for good seem almost endless.

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Now and then people get to discussing the good old days, and expressing wishes that things could be like that again.

Going barefoot. Swimming in the creek. Carefree summers when kids were in charge of their own recreation. Times when children were outdoors more, at school and in the summer. A busy downtown with all sorts of locally owned or operated stores, and a time we bought most things locally.

A chief bugbear of the brave new world is technology, or so it is asserted by many of a certain age, as they long for those carefree times.

By technology they mean modern communications technology, computers and computer networks, and the internet.

It is their conviction that before we had these confounded computers, kids learned better or learned to think more.

So now and then I challenge some of these people to give up their modern communications tools and rely on what was available in those halcyon days.

You guessed it. Most would not want to lose their cell phones. They really like being in frequent touch with their kids and grandkids. They enjoy seeing those current photos, lots of them.

Fond memories of school days of yore are a form of nostalgia for our youth. Wanting school to be like that now must be partly dependant on not accepting that people are expected to know, and kids are expected to learn, MORE now.

We Pennsylvanians who got good grades might think we must have been learning a lot. But in some cases we weren’t. This state didn’t have standardized tests, and some teachers, instead to teaching to the test, tested to what they taught, which wasn’t always enough.

These days people who have jobs or businesses use technology—how intensively and at what level depends on the job, but we all need to have computer skills. Most of us use social networking to some degree, including on the job.

A friend of mine who is getting her home-based business going, and who is a generally reluctant user of communications technology, realizes that she will need to have a domain, a web page, and a Facebook presence.

Her first time at an “expo,” my entrepreneurial friend had cards and brochures and a slide show. But she realizes the card and the brochure also need to list a website and a Facebook page. Today’s school kids are comfortable with those uses of technology. Many of their predecessors wish they were.