Genetic Engineering: Reading, Writing and Editing Genes

By Röbbe Wünschiers

This essential should serve as an introduction for a contemporary public discussion on genetic engineering. Genetic engineering affects us all in many areas and we must dare to think more colorful and further. In fact, the complete genetic material of viruses and bacteria can already be chemically produced and "brought to life". With genetic surgery, medicine is at a crossroads: do we want to treat hereditary diseases or "repair" them genetically? And the analysis of thousands of human genetic material reveals information that is related to complex diseases, but also to characteristics such as intelligence. How should we use this knowledge? The question is hardly whether we want genetic engineering, but rather how we use it.

This Springer essential is a translation of the original German 1st edition essentials, Gentechnik by Röbbe Wünschiers, published by The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jul 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9783658324032

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© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021

R. WünschiersGenetic Engineeringessentialshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-32403-2_1

1. Introduction

Röbbe Wünschiers¹  

(1)

University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Mittweida, Germany

Röbbe Wünschiers

Email: [e-mail]

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a macromolecule that is built from a sequence of building blocks, the nucleotides. In the case of humans, there are about 3.2 billion nucleotides. In cells, the genetic information is divided among several chromosomes. Every human body cell contains two times 23 chromosomes, each from the father and the mother. If the DNA of the 46 chromosomes of a single human cell were joined together to form a thread, it would be about two meters long. The DNA of all the cells of a human being would reach from the earth to the sun and back about four times. At around 9 billion km, this corresponds roughly to the orbit of the planet Saturn around the sun. The genetic information on the chromosomes is distributed among genes. The totality of all genes of a living being is generally referred to as the genome or individually as the genotype. A gene can be understood as a genetic information package that codes for a trait, for example, the blood group. The totality of all traits of a living being makes up its phenotype, its appearance. For example, since there are several blood groups (O, A, B, AB), there must be several variants of the responsible gene, which we call alleles. From each gene, we carry one maternal and one paternal allele. Some traits, such as eye color, involve many genes. The basis of any diagnostic analysis and genetic engineering work is a deep understanding of the function of a particular section of the genome. In the early days, this was only possible in a very rough way. So-called genetic markers were associated with phenotypic manifestations such as diseases or other characteristics. These markers were initially not nucleotide sequences (DNA sequences), but rather physical observations, such as the fact that DNA breaks down into fragments of varying size after treatment with a DNA-cutting enzyme (restriction enzyme). The size and distribution of the fragments could be measured and correlated with traits. Today, we can read the entire genetic material (the genome) of a living being, from bacteria to humans (see