Meeting Mr. DNA

What is DNA and where did it come from? We'll take a look at what we know about the building blocks for life as we know it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, inside the
cell is a tiny double helix another fancy word or

(00:23):
d n A. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we're gonna be recording the first part of
a two part episode on one of the most interesting
molecules in the entire universe. Dare I say the single
most interesting molecule. I mean it depends on if you
like yours at your nucleic acids being ribos oriented or

(00:43):
de ox. Get that ribos out of my head. This
is d n A. It's d n A time. So
this is gonna be part one. Uh, and today we're
going to mostly be focusing on the history and the
current research around using DNA. But please stick with us
also for next time when we're going to focus on
some topics aroun using DNA as a technological tool. Yeah,

(01:06):
and uh, as we record this, it is April twenty five,
which is National DNA Day. Complete coincidence, but a lovely coincidence. Yes,
I had no idea. Yeah, we didn't. I just happened
to find it while I was doing a search on
news about DNA. And the reason it is National DNA
Day is that on this day in two thousand three,
the Human Genome Project completed its quest to to map

(01:29):
out the human genome. So there you go, Happy National
DNA Day. So where's the treasure buried? Sadly, we don't
have all the information necessary to find the treasure? Here
here's the last part is stored in an our two
unit that we came. Yeah, it was not going to
go down the force unleashed path of logic. There in

(01:50):
lies madness. But I do want to say that I
read us an interesting thing from one of the researchers
who worked on the genome project, and because they're often asked, well,
if you mapped out the genome, why haven't we cured
cancer yet? Right, And they said, well, think of it
this way. Imagine that the human genome is really a
collection of ancient books written in a language no one

(02:13):
speaks or writes in anymore. You have just spent more,
you know, a decade or more, collecting all of the books,
and now you are absolutely certain that you have all
the books that make up the entire collection of this
one library, but just still can't read them yet, all
of them, or at least not all of them. And
that's what is going to be taking up a lot

(02:35):
of time for the next decade or so while we
while we learn what these books say and what they
mean and how to use them. Yeah. Right now we've
got the equivalent of like run spot run yeah, or
go spot go. I'm behind on my board book titles.
Let's see Dick and Jane is what you're talking about?

(02:55):
That that kind of thing. But uh, but yeah, So
so today, in this first episode, we wanted to just
talk about what DNA is and what it is being
used for currently. Look go into a little bit of
the history of of how it was potentially created here
on the planet Earth, and also how we discovered it,
because you know, it's a relatively resdiscovery in human history, right,

(03:18):
So let's start with the basics at base. DNA is,
of course chemistry, but as we all know, it's the
basis for all of the stuff we know of in
the universe that is definitely in the alive category, though
maybe not some things that are just maybe sort of alive,
like prions and we're not going to do all the
standard stuff you learned in school about what DNA does,

(03:39):
but just for a brief refresher, the really simple version,
what does DNA do well. You can think about your
body as a type of machine, and that machine is
made up of parts, and most of these parts are proteins.
Proteins are like tiny, very simple robots that work together
to make more complex robots that are your organs, which

(03:59):
of course has work together to make the real robot,
which is you. But they're all these little robots in
your body and their proteins. So what makes these proteins.
The answer is d n A. DNA or de oxy
ribonucleic acid, is a long chain molecule. It's one really
huge long molecule that contains an ordered sequence of what

(04:22):
are called nucleotides. These are the building box of the
d n A and the sequence of the nucleotides, what
order they come in determines what proteins get made and
how they get used. So DNA, you can think of
it as like both the code for what your body
should be like and also the machine that builds the
machines that builds the machines that build your body, one

(04:45):
protein at a time. Now, if you find all that confusing,
you can just refer to the helpful educational film Mr
DNA at the beginning of Jurassic Park, which is so
good is actually, where did you come from? I watched
it again before we before we recorded the show. So
let's talk about, like, well, where do we think DNA

(05:05):
came from? Like where? What? Why? We know that it's
it's integral to life here on Earth. How did it
get started? That's a really interesting question, and it's easily
a whole episode in itself, So we can't explore that
entirely here if we want to get to all the
other stuff we were going to talk about today. But
the short answer is this is still a really big,

(05:27):
unsettled question in the origins of life in biochemistry. We
have some good ideas, but nobody really knows with confidence
yet where DNA came from an exactly what role it
played in the emergence of life on Earth, for example,
one big question, Like we said earlier, DNA is the
basis of pretty much all life on Earth today, But
which came first? D NA or life? Was there non

(05:51):
DNA based life before there was DNA based life? Yeah,
it's one of those chicken or the egg kind of
kind of questions. Exactly it really is and uh, it's
the There have been plenty of people looking into trying
to at least hypothesize where DNA came from, whether or
not it was a product of some early form of life,
or if in fact it was the thing that allowed

(06:13):
life to emerge. Yeah, and one issue here is that
DNA is a it's a very complex molecule. It doesn't
and so for this reason, people generally don't think it
looks like something that would randomly self as symbol without
some sort of precursor. Uh. And so a lot of
the question that allow the investigations on where did DNA

(06:33):
come from? Or looking at like well, what could a
chemical precursor be? What could there have been that facilitated
the creation of this really complex molecule. And one very
popular theory, though we don't know it's the answer yet,
it's a strong hypothesis, is the so called RNA world
So ribonucleic acid. Yeah, this is a somewhat simpler molecule

(06:55):
than dnah. Yeah, Yeah, let's clarify the difference there between
the two. All right, So they're both nuke aic acids. Uh,
First of all, the sugar element of the nucleic acids
that they're composed of a sugar element as well some
other pieces, But the sugar element is different from both.
You have de oxy ribos for DNA and just ribos
for RNA. That's that's a major difference right there. Who

(07:17):
who Who gets out of bed for ribos? Really, you
got to hold out for that d oxy ribos if
you if you're lacking DNA, you're not kicking out of bed.
DNA is double stranded. You always think of that that classic, uh,
double helix twisted ladder we'll talk about in a minute.
RNA is a single strand molecule. DNA stores and transfers

(07:39):
genetic information and humans. RNA codes for amino acids and
acts kind of like a messenger between DNA and ribosomes
to make proteins. So those are the differences. So let's
talk about some of the research. In two thousand nine,
a group of scientists successfully synthesized two of the four
nucleotides that make up RNA using chemicals that we believe
we're present on primordial Earth. So this does not necessarily

(08:03):
mean that the hypothesis is true. It just means it
makes it sort of plausible, at least for urna right,
that RNA could spontaneously form based upon some conditions on Earth.
And again, it's only the proof of two of those
four nucleotides. They're still working on the other two to
see if there's a way that the chemicals that we
think we're around in primordial Earth could have developed into

(08:27):
these building blocks for RNA. Um Now, one of those
scientists have since has since gone on to see if
he can do the same thing with DNA nucleotides using
a similar approach to that RNA experiment. Uh, but sugars
in DNA nucleotides are harder to work with in RNA
counterparts before you actually assemble into DNA. Once it's assembled

(08:50):
in DNA, it's really stable. Yeah, but before then it's
just tough to work with. So ultimately, we still don't
know if RNA and so DNA preceded life, but at
least the work that we've seen so far suggests that
it's still plausible. It's it's not necessarily um a dead

(09:10):
end yet until we get to a point that we
have to say, well, we've tried everything. We can't get
any of these chemicals to work out the way we
thought it would back on the primordial Earth conditions. Maybe
there's an alternative answer to this question. Yeah, it's a
fascinating question, absolutely crazy that we don't know the answer
to this, and so it's so exciting to read about,

(09:32):
you know, what we're learning. Yeah, so it's so big
and basic. Other research that I've read indicated that another factor,
meteor impacts in primordial Earth, might have been the key
to putting all of this together. Um and Okay. One
of the theories about how DNA and life in general
arose on Earth is that amino acids and nucleotides hitched

(09:53):
a ride here on meteors and other bodies that you know,
we're from elsewhere, and that's how they got here. Now,
of course that doesn't answer the question of how they
were assembled, but that's how they arrived on this planet. Sure,
which is you know, yeah, it's it's a it's a
set of questions that also go together. Clearly, the lizard
people put it together, right, and they put it on

(10:13):
rocks and pushed them to Earth. Well, absolutely, is that
what you call those naked dudes in prometheus lizard people
I call them frequently. Go ahead, Lauren, excellent. So there
has been though skepticism in the research community about whether
that the breadth of amino acids and nucleotides that we
see here on Earth could have possibly arrived intact, or

(10:35):
even could have formed from things that might have arrived intact.
But so there was the study that was published back
in August by team out of Japan, and they simulated
a meteorite hitting an ancient ocean, and they found that
the energy from the impact, together with the raw physical
materials that the inorganic compounds that were likely to have

(10:57):
been present, could indeed have formed armed nucleo nucleotides and
amino acids. They they found when they when they studied
their post impact stuff, they found nine amino acids that
are all involved with the formation of proteins and also
to nucleotides. So that's that's pretty fascinating. That's really an
interesting idea. And obviously, if we were to study this

(11:21):
further and and conclude that in fact these molecules were
extraterrestrial in nature, as Joe was pointing out, that then
leads to a whole new series of questions. Which or
maybe even more interesting. Yeah, yeah, the and it may
be that perhaps these are questions that are are ultimately
unknowable to us. We don't know, maybe that that we

(11:43):
will have a certain percentage of certainty for one versus another,
but uh, I'm not entirely certain short of time travel,
how we would ever get to the very bottom of this, like,
what would be the the conclusive proof that would uh
make one hypothesis stand well over the other. It seems

(12:04):
like probably the best we could hope to do is
if we could offer a lot of hypotheses and note
that eventually one of them works under lab conditions and
the others don't, which gives you some degree of confidence
that that's probably the right answer. But we'll never really know,
right right, it's not really approvable hypothesis. Um but but hey, okay, so,

(12:25):
speaking of time travel, we have here in the studio
with us today the way back machine from tech stuff, Yeah,
tech stuff and stuff you should know. I mean, it's
been a long time since I've seen this baby, and
I gotta tell you it's a little worse for wear.
I'm pretty sure the stuff you should know, guys have
been going back to the sixties for some fun. But yeah,
let's us and chalk. Let's put it to use and

(12:46):
really find out. Like, let's let's talk about the actual
discovery of d n A, not not when it was
potentially first formed on Earth, but when we humans first
became aware of it. Okay, well, you may have heard
this story before. Of course. The answer is that Watson
and Crick discovered DNA in the nineteen fifties. Except that's
not true. But the book told me, no, this is

(13:09):
the thing for some reason, even my I've read about
this before, and even my brain goes to this place. Yeah,
Watson and Crick discovered DNA. That's not true. Uh so
who really did discover d NA? What is it that
Watson and Crick supposedly discovered or or contributed to our
understanding of DNA. One interesting fact to point out, people

(13:31):
knew about heredity before they knew about DNA, and this
is a thing that can easily be lost because we
now equate to DNA in standard conversation with the idea
of heritable and information. So you get stuff from your parents,
people just say, oh, it's in your d n A.
But that that is a relatively recent thing to enter
the common parlance, and so people knew about inheriting traits

(13:55):
from parents long before they knew what the molecule was
in the body that conveyed that information. Right, right, So
in order to get to the bottom of this question,
we're going to go back in our way back machine
to eighteen sixty nine. Oh, that's why the numbers are.
I was wondering. I just thought that was just randomly
put there when I was saying sixties, I actually did

(14:15):
me the eighteen sixties. Well, what were there good party
times there too? I just assumed if Josh and Chuck
were doing it. But now I know that nine was
set for us. You ever seen Gone with the Wind,
there's lots of parties. Yeah right, let's just don't look
like a lot of fun. Let's just get in the
way back machine and go check out where we're going. Okay,

(14:40):
we're here, and there's so much pus. So in eighteen
sixty nine, there's this Swiss biochemist at the University of
tubing In and his name is Johann Friedrich Mescher, and
he was studying puss. That explains this then, no joke. Yeah,
so there's plus everywhere. Mitscher had a. He had an arrangement,

(15:03):
you might say, with a nearby surgical clinic that would
send him filthy used bandages that were dripping with pus.
And you know, when you think about filthy used bandages
dripping with pus, most people you wouldn't want to handle them,
you know, do things with them, spend your Saturday on them.
Not not way up on my list of things to do.
But in fact, these pus soaked bandages turned out to

(15:24):
be a scientific gold mine because of the following reason.
So plus contains mostly dead lucacites, which are white blood cells.
He was studying these white blood cells to understand the
proteins in them. But Mescher also discovered in the course
of his research that in the nucleus of each of
the white blood cells there was a common substance that

(15:47):
had nitrogen and phosphorus atoms in it and which was
chemically distinct from the protein. So it's this stuff there
in the cell nucleus. It's not a protein. It's got
nitrogen and phosphorus. It is it. And he called this
stuff nucleon, which later became known as nucleic acid. And
once it was totally isolated from the surrounding proteins and

(16:09):
all the other stuff. The pure molecule got the name
we know today de oxy ribonucleic acid or d n A. Well,
this is fascinating, Joe, but I would like us all
to take a pledge that none of us will utter
the word PUS again in the rest of this episode.
I will with with one small exception, and that is,

(16:31):
can we get out of this PUS party? I would
I would like, do you have any parties to take
us to that aren't made of pus? Well, let's see
where we could go on the quickly summarized scientific research
bandwagon party. Well, luckily there's a montage button inside the
way back machines and just hit that. Yeah, now we
gotta go on the montage because there are actually a

(16:52):
bunch of scientists over the ensuing decades that contributed a
lot more to the study of heredity and d n A,
And we don't have time to go into all of
their research. But but so after me share at this point,
you know that there are genes that convey traits from
parents to offspring, and we know about DNA, but we
hadn't put them together. We didn't know that one was
the DNA was the agent of heredity. And so in

(17:16):
nineteen forty four group of scientists Avery, McLeod and McCarty
showed that DNA conveys hereditary traits, that DNA is the
agent of mendalian genetics. And finally, in nineteen fifty three,
you finally got to Krick and Watson, plus a couple others, Actually,
Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin demonstrated

(17:37):
the structure of DNA. So they put together the model
of the double helix molecule of DNA, the one we've
all seen now. It looks like a ladder that you
twisted up like a spring or like a like a
like a spiral staircase. Yeah, yeah, spiral ladder, I guess, yeah. Uh.
And so it's got two spiraling parallel pull ales that

(18:00):
are connected by rungs of nucleo basis. And the important
thing about discovering the double helix shape of the molecule
was that this showed how the DNA molecule was capable
of conveying genetic information. Well, let's let's go ahead and
pop on back over into a modern day and back
into our studio and and and just concentrate more about

(18:25):
uh little other stuff we've learned about this amazing molecule. Okay, yes,
this is better for reasons that I've promised not to
mention again. Um okay, Joe, you are so lucky the
the Acts of Mysticism is not currently in the podcast studio.

(18:49):
Not the Mystical Acts. You never used the Mystical Acts
as a weapon. I'm sorely tempted. Okay. So, despite this
rich history of research into into DNA, there's still so
much that is going on in the field, all these
studies being conducted, questions being answered, new questions that we
never even conceived of being posed. And so so we

(19:09):
wanted to give y'all a quick sample of some of
the stuff we've seen recently, just to give you an
idea of of what kind of things are going on. Yeah. So,
first of all, we were talking about that double helix shape.
One of the interesting bits of research that we encountered
while looking into the topic was that some scientists have
shown that DNA doesn't just hold that double helix shape. Yeah,

(19:32):
it actually comes in lots of fun shapes. Yeah. So
I as I as I said, is it kind of boogies.
It moves around a lot. And actually, when you think
about get stars, moons and balloons and clovers, it's not
the Lucky Charm shapes, although some of them are similar
to them. All right, So what's the deal here. We've
been told about this double helix shape forever. Why are
we suddenly seeing different shapes? Well, part of what I've

(19:56):
read is that when Watson and Crick were really described
the structure of DNA, they were looking at a length
of DNA that was about twelve base pairs long, something
like that, like one turn of DNA. But DNA has
to turn many, many, many times. It has to be
super coiled because DNA is a very long molecule. But
it has to fit within the nucleus of a cell, right,

(20:18):
And most nucleus nucleus is nuclei of cells are not
a few meters long. It really the length of a
DNA chain, right, So to fit that inside a cell's nucleus,
you have to coil and coil and coil and coil.
This this shape. And if you've ever dealt with any
kind of like cable or anything, any real long length
of of something that's got lots of kinks, and then

(20:40):
you can see all sorts of weird shapes. And also
as you uncoil it, it can spring in ways that
are terrifying. Uh So the DNA molecule ends up creating these,
uh these other odd shapes that that the scientists were
able to observe. Um it was kind of interesting how
they did it. They used a method called cryo electron

(21:02):
tomography uh to study the the actual shapes, and they
observed all sorts of interesting ones, like figure eights or
coiled so tightly that look like it was a rod,
not even two separate strands anymore. Also, according to one
of the scientists, some of them look like rackets or handcuffs.

(21:22):
So maybe maybe if your molecules are being naughty in
your cells nucleus, the DNA will just go ahead and
slap the cuffs on. I don't know how that works
at any rate. No clovers though, no clovers that I saw.
I mean, it's entirely possible that it just was not
included on the list. Probably probably horseshoes, though if you
crossed a couple of pairs of handcuffs, you'd essentially have

(21:44):
a clover. Yeah, I would allow for the possibility that
a clover could in fact be one of the many
shapes that DNA could take, but depending on the coiling. Uh.
The important thing here, though, is that understanding the shape
of the molecules can help doctors developed better medicines and
scientists helped develop better medicines because the the drugs we take,

(22:06):
typically what does It releases some molecules into our system,
and those molecules are looking for other molecules of a
specific shape. So knowing more about the shape of DNA
can make more effective medicines that are specifically looking for
those shapes. So it does have a practical application. It's
not just the idea of we just want to learn more, although,

(22:28):
as we say on the show all the time, that
then itself is a worthy endeavor most of the time. Okay,
how about one other really interesting fact about DNA. We
mentioned earlier, how there was the discovery over time that
DNA is the gene, that DNA is the molecule in
the body that conveys genetic information from parent to offspring.

(22:48):
But one of the weird facts that we're discovering we
actually started discovering in the twentieth century, but that we're
learning more about all the time. Is something called horizontal
gene transfer, which is where you can get a gene
in your genome that doesn't come from your parents. Doesn't
happen very often with humans, happens all the time with

(23:09):
single celled organisms like bacteria, where where they can trade genes.
It's almost like a way for bacteria to sort of
have sex. They don't really, but they can exchange genetic
information back and forth between their genomes and UH. And
it turns out that there appears to be DNA within
the genomes of larger organisms that looks like it probably

(23:33):
came from organisms other than this organism's direct ancestors. Yeah. Yeah,
and you might wonder how could something like that happen uh,
And in fact, it can happen through something that's called
the endogenous retrovirus or e r V s UM. These
are retroviruses that once infected UH some sort of organism

(23:57):
in the past, and they're really really really replicating themselves,
at least for a few generations until mutations make that
a non factor. So the way this works as a
retrovirus can replicate self by infiltrating a cell a host
cell and inserts some of its own viral genome into
the nuclear genome of the host cell. So it's sort of,

(24:19):
you know, hacking into the mainframe, putting a copy of
itself into the host cell. Now this you this can
include doesn't normally include it usually, but it can include
a germline cells. Those are the cells that produce egg
and sperm cells. And once in a while, even more
rarely and infected germline cell will go on to develop
into a viable organism. And so then you'll have this

(24:43):
viral genome become part of the genome of the overall organism.
And that's where you get this this mysterious DNA that
would not have been part of a typical individual of
that organism species. It's actually been introduced through this virus. Yeah,
and these strains of the genome, the viral genome can

(25:05):
remain in the organism's genome over the course of numerous generations,
over millions of years in fact. But because organisms undergo mutation,
typically uh, one mutation or another is going to render
the the viral genomes ability to replicate the actual virus
null and void. So you'll you'll eventually get to a

(25:28):
point where the organisms have the viral genome as part
of their d N A, but they're not making the
virus anymore because of other unrelated mutations that that organism
species has undergone over multiple generations. Uh yeah, And and
no one's really sure how much of our DNA could
have possibly been influenced by this kind of process. Some

(25:50):
estimates have it as high as like eight percent, which
is crazy. Yeah, now, one that is amazing. But one
thing to clarify is that you shouldn't misunderstand. You shouldn't
think it. Oh, if I have eight percent of my
genome from bacteria or viruses or some of their organisms
on Earth, it's not like that happened since you were
born then like over the generations this many horizontal gene

(26:13):
transfer events have accumulated into the genome that created you
when you were born, right right, um. And but part
of the reason that it's difficult to suss out how
this happens is that it's really hard to get direct
observational evidence of it. And one what one bit of
research that that we ran across was this this study

(26:36):
into a transfer between pine trees and insects that happened
millions of years ago and basically has made pine trees
what they are today and just and you know, it's
the first time that we've it's one of the few
times rather that we have directly observed being able to
directly trace that kind of data. So cool stuff. It's

(26:58):
really interesting. If you all don't mind me plugging on
the other podcast that I do Steff to blow your mind,
Robert Lamb and I did an episode on horizontal gene
transfer back in December, I think, so if you want
to check that out, there's a whole episode on that awesome. Yeah.
Uh well. One of the other questions that has been
kind of roiling around in the scientific community is how

(27:18):
cells protect their DNA m M with extreme prejudice. It's yes,
I mean, and that is the answer really because okay, so,
so the inner cell mechanics involving DNA are are complex
because DNA is stored in its cells nucleus um. The
nucleus is surrounded by this complex structure called the nuclear envelope,

(27:40):
which contains a series of gates that lead in and
out of it, which is called the nuclear poor complex.
And you know, molecules have to get in and out
of the nucleus so that cell could like create proteins
and do stuff, but the envelope also has to be
vigilant because if a virus can penetrate it, then it'll
hijack the cells DNA to do its bidding bad times. Um.

(28:03):
And there are even some diseases that specifically weaken the
envelope and make your cell nuclei more suceptible to viral infection.
But it's difficult to study because because in terms of
cell proportion, the envelope is huge and and the poor
complex is constantly shifting. Researchers the research that I read

(28:23):
referred to it like as like jiggling, like like gelatine,
like a big old bowl or jelly. Um. So, so
it's been really hard to to get it to get
a handle on. And this team out of cal Tech
has been working on it for like a decade and
finally uh in in in this year in ten started
to publish results that explain exactly how molecules get transferred

(28:46):
uh or transported rather like like lead into and out
of the pores, and how data is moved from DNA
to r n A to ribosomes, which, as we said earlier,
do that actual work of some the sizing proteins within cells.
So so so learning about all of this is is
just really cool and could help us suss out how

(29:08):
to protect ourselves against viral infections. Well, that's obviously a
good thing because of how dependent we are on our DNA.
Isn't it kind of annoying that we've got a cow
to out to this tiny little molecule. Why can't we
be the boss? Why can't we make DNA do what
we wanted to do? Well, we're getting there. Uh, it's
it's it's complicated, but we're getting there. What's really cool

(29:31):
is that we've actually seen some some scientists work with
DNA as if it were a programming language, right, Like
it is essentially a set of instructions. So if you
were able to write a specific set of instructions, you
could in theory make some sort of cell do something
that you wanted to do. Um. So, some synthetic biologists

(29:53):
have been working with DNA to find ways to manipulate
it and program it in this way. So some m
I T developed a software CELLO C E L l O.
That's essentially because of the way I'm I'm talking right now,
it sounds like I'm saying jello. Uh. No, It makes
me wonder why didn't they just go ahead and stick
an H in there. Yeah, it would have been funny. Cello. Uh.

(30:15):
That's essentially a programming language for DNA. I'm sure it
stands for something, and I just didn't see what it
stood for. Wait a minute, a programming language for DNA.
Now that's interesting because often oftentimes people use the analogy
of a programming language to describe DNA. Right, So this approach,
what does It allows people who are not advanced synthetic

(30:38):
biologists to come up with ways of programming a strand
of DNA to execute a specific type of instruction under
a specific circumstances. So, in classic computing terms, you can
think of it as an if then if sell encounters X,
then do action Y like that sort of thing. You

(30:59):
can actually prob ramm it to do that sort of stuff.
That's fascinating. It's pretty cool. So one of the examples
that I read about in Nature that was that where
this article was published, said, imagine that you you create
a strand of DNA that tells the cell to produce
a certain drug whenever the cell detects a particular set
of metabolic conditions. So, in other words, if that those

(31:22):
metabolic conditions are present, the cell goes into production mode
and starts producing this drug, you could easily see how
something like that could be incredible for different medicinal purposes. Yeah, hypothetically.
I mean, I'm not sure if this is something that
would be possibly on the table. But if if your
if your body starts producing histamines in response to some
kind of allergen that it's just freaking out about, then

(31:45):
your cells could detect those histamines and create antihistamines to
calm everything down. I would like that because I miss shrimp. Yeah,
that's all right, that's all right. I've got other things
I can eat. I don't really mind. Well, maybe maybe
that's coming in the future, I should hope so, because
a friend of mine was shared a picture of shrimp
and grits on Facebook, and now that's all I can
think about all that terrible human You listeners out there

(32:07):
should know that Jonathan and I were sitting in the
studio before recording and he was just mourning the fact
that he couldn't meet this shrimp. It was pretty rough,
but but it's all right. There are bigger problems in
the world than my allergy to shellfish. One of those
problems actually is how do we produce synthetic DNA in
a way that is uh cost effective and and is

(32:31):
relatively simple, because, as it turns out, making DNA in
the lab is expensive, it's complicated, takes a lot of energy.
Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that part. So
we're talking about having a programming language for DNA. But
what good is that If you can write a program
but you can't turn it into physical molecules, It's it's tough, right.
So one of the things that we read about that

(32:53):
I thought was so interesting was, um, some scientists were
looking at the possibility of using different kim micle's while
working with DNA and seeing how that would affect the process.
And one person in this uh this group of researchers
said we should really try cyanuric acid. And I knew him.
Her issue ye a fellow of infinite jest. He used

(33:18):
to clean my pool. The reason I say that is
cyanuric acid is actually used by by people to to
as a treatment for pools. Actually, yeah, it's a stabilizer.
So you know you've heard about adding chlorine to pools
so that you can make sure your your pool is
not infest about it. I felt it in my eyeball. Well,
cyanuric acid, what does It binds with chlorine and allows

(33:40):
for a more controlled release of chlorine so that you
don't just end up like deep shocking your pool and
then you know, thirty minutes later it just becomes a
bacterious cesspit that you don't want that to happen. But
cian uric acid also has an effect on d N
a uh. It actually can cause DNA to form into
triple helix formations. The sin uric acid ends up becoming

(34:03):
essentially a third rail of that ladder, and it then
ends up having the other two sides bind with it.
And this allows for the potential new use of DNA
in various nanotechnology applications. At the moment, it's really early
right now we know that this is the effect it
can have on DNA. Where we can actually apply that

(34:27):
knowledge remains to be seen. There are a lot of
hopes that we can use this in multiple ways, but
we're still kind of in the earliest days right now,
so it's not like I have a practical application I
can just spring out there. So that's sort of our
our our kind of d N A one oh one,
which has lots of open questions in it that are

(34:47):
are currently being studied by people who are dedicating their
lives to that kind of research. In our next episode,
we're really going to look at how are we using
DNA in practical applications today and how do we hope
to use it in the future. Some of the ways
apart from just using it to make our bodies right right,
I mean we'll still be doing that fingers crossed. I'm

(35:09):
not talking about like using it unconsciously. I mean, like
consciously making use of as a technology, right, using DNA
as a technology. So we're gonna really focus on that
in our next episode. Guys. Remember if you have any
suggestions for future episodes, we have questions or comments on
things we've said, get in touch with us. Let us know.
We love to hear from you. Guys. The address you

(35:29):
can use if you want to use email is f
W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. Or you
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You can leave us a message there, and we will
talk to you again about DNA really soon. For more

(35:55):
on this topic in the Future of technology visits Forward
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