 I may be doing tardigrade research, but today you will not see a single teacher of tardigrade because my talk today won't be about tardigrade. That would be about single tardigrade. Well, let's start with a simple question. Why won't we make a flying tower? Well, not that we really need one at the moment, but like imagine, why not? It would be funny, yes, a cow flying somewhere in the sky. Well, we do have genetic engineering. We can transfer genes from one organism to the other. We can make a mouse which glows because it has a gene from the jellyfish. We can make a bacteria which produces some medicine, some hormones for example for humans because it has a gene from humans and so on. So, why won't we just take some genes from a pet, transfer it to a cow and then we'll know that a cow is a giant bat wing, amazing. However, the problem is that currently we're not able to do that. And that's not the problem of the tools. We have quite efficient tools. We mentioned CRISPR and other tools. They are wonderful. They help to do amazing things. But the problem is that we do understand many traits so well as for now. Well, genetics as a science of hereditary temperature started not so far away, by the way. So, we are now here, somewhere in Greco, whereas that is the place in the city of Vermont where Gregor Mendel made his discovery. Well, Gregor Mendel was a monk. He lived in the monastery. That's what monks usually do. And he made experiments. At first, he did experiments with mice. He tried to breed mice, but then they had the monastery pendulum. And then Mendel switched to pea plants and he crossed pea plants of different varieties which were different in some particular trade like purple flowers versus white flowers, yellow seeds versus green seeds and so on. And by doing quite a lot of work, quite a lot of field work, he discovered the principles of genetics which we now call Mendel's principles or sometimes Mendel's laws. And one of those discoveries was basically that we really have some hereditary units. And we inherit one hereditary unit from our father, the other from our mother. And the combination of them may give us this or that effect. Mendel did know what these units were, but today we know that they are genes. Genes are pieces of DNA molecules which are found in our chromosomes inside of almost each of our cells in the body. And today we know how genes work. We know that these pieces of DNA encode RNA molecules. RNA molecules are necessary to create proteins and proteins are everything in our body. Proteins contribute to all of our traits like hair color, color of the eyes, color of the skin, blood growth and so on. There are many of them. And that's really great. It's all based on the discoveries of President Mendel and on the central document of the molecular biology which you see here which was proposed by Francis Greene in the 1950s. But there is one very old idea of classical genetics which is actually not so true but many people still believe in that. Well, this idea is as follows. A gene corresponds to one particular protein and that corresponds to some particular trait. So we can talk about genes of four traits. Well, nobody recognizes that seriously in genetics and science but many people still think of genetics something like that. Yeah, there are genes for traits and you can read these. Scientists discovered a gene for ability. Scientists discovered a gene for alcoholism. A gene for that and a gene for this. Well, one of the reasons why many people still believe it is the way genetics is usually taught in schools, possibly. Well, here is the typical picture from the textbook for genetics. Here you see two parents which have some particular trait, the same trait, different traits, and well, they cross and among their offspring we can see offspring with different traits. For example, well, it's a funny moment from basic school genetics that if we cross two black cats, theoretically in their offspring might be a white cat because each of these black cats might be a carrier of the variant of a gene which is actually for, like, white for, not for, black for. And that is very helpful in teaching basics of genetics, of course, and learning it. However, it confirms that outdated idea that genes somehow corresponds to traits. And if we try to apply this idea to people, well, we may try. And that's also an example from a textbook, yeah? You see? A parent with brown eyes, another parent with brown eyes, and they might have some children with blue eyes. Yeah? Well, very similar to the people at Gregor Mandel. But the problem is that this funny table, this funny squares about human traits are actually wrong because it doesn't work like that. If you think about the color of their eyes, the color of the iris, it's very dangerous. People might have darker brown eyes, hazy eyes, light blue, dark blue, and many, many different variants. And so it's very hard to people with exactly the same shade of color of eyes, in fact. Well, some textbooks deal with that a little bit better. They present pictures like that, that the model is two genes. So they say, okay, yeah, there is not a single gene. These are two genes interact with each other. And of course, this model is closer to truth. But even that model with two genes does not represent the reality like 100% correctly. Because in fact, yeah, there are two genes which mainly influence color of eyes, but there are dozens of others which can also influence that. So in fact, a single gene and two genes do not correspond to that simple trait, color of eyes. And often in the genetics classes, a teacher offers us to do some funny game. Well, we can play it like now, by the way. Well, raise your hand. Well, who can roll the tongue? Yeah, we'll try to do that and like, okay. And who can not? Well, I can not for sure. There are not so many people. Yeah, I'll admit that, yeah. That's not so bad at all. But as they say, well, okay, that would be like, well, a dominant trait, that would be a recessive trait, and that is somehow related to the people Yeah, green seeds, yellow seeds, people who can roll the tongue, people who cannot roll the tongue yet, and then there are many more traits to follow. Well, people with dimples and people without dimples, people having widows peek on the Caroline, and people with straight Caroline, people who, when they cross their fingers like that, and the right is on the top, and the left is on the top, and so on. There are many different characters like that. But the problem is that actually none of these is an indelible trait. Yeah? Because for some of them, we have a strong doubt that they are indelible, that they are inherited in the indelible way, or for some of them, we certainly know that they are not inherited in this way. So there are no good examples which can be demonstrated in the class for single gene traits. And my opinion is that single gene traits in humans actually almost do not exist. The only thing which can be really called, more or less, like single genish in people, would be in the field of medical genetics. That would be the story of single gene disorder, single gene conditions. Yeah? So in the Internet, there is a nice database called OMIM online and daily inheritance in men, and that is the database listing mostly territory conditions, many of which really result from a mutation or a change in a single gene. For instance, there is a disease called sciatic fibrosis, or eukopithecidosis. That's a rare disease, but it affects more than 1,000 people in Poland still, probably even more. We know the reason of that disease. That is a mutation that is a change in one particular gene, CFTR gene, which is situated at the chromosome number 7. So we know its genetic origin very well. And the main symptoms of the disease are problems with the respiratory system, mainly in the lungs and bronx, and also some problems with the pancreas. Well, why did that happen? When the mutation affects that gene, one of the proteins called CFTR stops working, but what kind of protein is that? That is the protein situated in the membrane of the cell. Well, basically there are a lot of proteins in the membrane, and there is also a different function, but some of them really transport substances into the cell or from the cell or both. So CFTR is of that kind. Well, if it works, it should transport chloride ions from the cells, and it is also associated with the transfer of water molecules. What's important? That's important for the normal mucus production. If a mutation affects the gene and the protein would be abnormal, it won't be able to transport chloride ions in the water, and as a result of that, the mucus will be very thick and viscous. It won't be removed from the respiratory tract, and that would result with frequent infections and also with inability to breathe normally. And earlier, when the treatment was not available, people with cystic fibrosis experienced early tests at the age of like 20 years, even earlier. And yet, we have a mutation in a single gene, we have a single protein infection, but we have problems not only in the lungs, in fact. The whole list of cystic fibrosis would be very long. You see, it affects so many things in the body at the same time. So even if there is something like single gene, it may affect so many things in the body at the same time. Well, it's hard to think of it. You can still imagine our genome as a blueprint of the body. And as for example, here is the technical scheme of simplifiers, of course, of the car. And there are different parts of the car, the doors and the wheels and so on. And if you think, well, the genome, each gene corresponds to some body parts, to some organ, to some structure in the body. It's hard to imagine why one gene has problems all over the body. But in fact, our genome does not look like that. I would rather compare it to the recipe. Yes? So how to cook something in the kitchen. Yes? So we have some ingredients, some oil, sugar, yes, yeast and so on, water. We mix them, we do some procedures and we obtain the dish. And we cannot say in many cases which particular slide, which particular part of the dish corresponds to each ingredient. There is no such a correspondence. But what we can say sometimes is what happens if we change the recipe? Yeah, for example, for this recipe for homemade pita, I didn't put that on my own, but, if we take 10 spoons of salt instead of half, well, I can predict what happens. Yeah? It would be whole. And we can, well, do the same thing with the organ. See, I don't know if some mutation happens, we can sometimes predict what would be the results. Well, for instance, I will tell a story about hedgehog. Yeah, I don't know, everybody likes hedgehogs. Well, hedgehog is the name of a gene in a fruit fly. And the reason why it's called so is that a mutation in the gene changes the value of the larva. Well, that's an adult fruit fly, and that's a larva that's with warm light. But if it is a mutant larva, it becomes not only warm light, but also like hedgehog light. Because these dental bands all fuse together, the body is shortened, and the larva looks like a small hedgehog. So, you see, the gene is named, not after what it normally should do, but the gene is named on like what happens if it doesn't work properly. And by the way, in genetics, especially in early times, that was the usual way to name the genes. For instance, well, there is a gene called tinman. Yeah, we don't know. Tinman didn't have the heart, yeah? And the gene tinman, basically, the mutation in it affects the structure of the heart. Where is the gene called can and barbie? Well, you can guess what it does, but the mutation of it affects the structure of sexual organs. There is a gene called sweet cheese, and the mutation in it just follows in the brain, well, not so funny, of course. And there is a gene called van Gogh, yeah, just imagine. And the fruit flies, which have mutation in them, the gene has their wings curled like this, like famous painting. So the genes are commonly named after their particular mutations, and that gene was named Hedgehog, but that was not the end of the story, by the way. Later, after the gene was discovered in fruit flies, similar genes were discovered in vertebrates, and there were three of them, not one. And so each of them was named after some particular Hedgehog, yeah? Two of them were named after two species of Hedgehog which really exist. Somewhere in the planet, there's a Hedgehog, and in there, Hedgehog, and the third one, well, possibly the most famous one, was named after Sony Hedgehog, after the Hedgehog from the computer game and later movie. Later, like, was that thinking? What does that Hedgehog do, actually? And in fact, it does so many things. It affects central neural system development, eye development, finger development, disc development. That's one of the most important genes. Well, we still call it Hedgehog because of that mutation in the fruit fly, but in fact, that's one of the most important genes in our own development. So you see that the same gene affects so many things in the body at the same time. And on the other hand, if we look at some particular function, like eye development, and we think how Sony Hedgehog influences that, we'll see something like that. Well, here is it. Here is our Sony SHH, yeah? That's our gene. But there are many other genes interacting with that. So Sony Hedgehog alone is not enough to make an eye, yeah? There's interaction of many genes and environment for that. So from one side, one gene may influence a lot of traits. On the other side, the same trait is influenced by a lot of genes. So there is no straightforward correspondence. Well, and I will finish with one of my favorite cartoons, you know, the Soviet cartoon. And I like it for two reasons. First of all, it's quite psychedelic, and certainly it could create that they used some substances. But I like it not for that, mainly. I like it because it demonstrates how genetics works, yeah? On the first glance, well, you don't see why, what is the correspondence between these and genetics, but I'll tell you. That's the story of a boy who went into the music box, so his music box was broken, so he became very small and he got into the music box. And there he found a single detail, which was broken. He repaired that and music box started playing music again. So why do you use that for, too? Well, I insist that, yeah, a single detail if it is broken can stop the music. But this single detail is not creating the music. To create the music with it, a lot of details inside of the music box are interacting with each other. The same is with our genome, so a mutation in a single gene or a single gene mutation can really cause a disease and can cause some particular abnormal traits. But there is a necessity to use a lot of genes in order to make a normal trait still. So when we are discussing genetic engineering, when we are playing God, creating and changing the organisms, yeah, it's a good thing to think playing our own music or we are just trying to break something in the music which is already playing or we are trying to modify it to sound better. That's for me, that's a very good question. Well, thank you for watching.