 Hacking the DNA because like Oscar already said it's surprisingly digital which also makes it sort of our thing in a way and Part of hacking DNA the way professionals do it is remarkably Using words like that we know like there's even a thing called shell codes in there Which is just like the shell codes that we know So I'm gonna start off very briefly By thanking all the people that made all the nice pictures that I Lovingly borrowed for this presentation if you go to the URL you can see the credits exactly who made them Oscar already introduced me, so I'm not originally a biologist, but I started studying DNA in 2001 and Over time apparently I managed to fool some people that I'm a real biologist, so I was allowed to do some research in the Delft University and and some of you may know me from a Presentation on the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, which was read by 1.7 million people It's an interesting thing that means that a lot of people really really care, but I've never written anything that was read by 1.7 million people, so apparently we want to know about this DNA stuff I also managed to fool some magazines into publishing my research But but it's for real and it's a sort of a joke I fooled them now It is a real research and it turns out that if you are Thinking like a reverse engineer if you are thinking about big data sets you can go to DNA and Invent stuff that other people have not seen before So and you you could do that if you had oodles of free time But then you could do that So I'm gonna talk about Manipulating DNA But I want to make it very clear that I'm talking here about the technology. I'm telling how it works I'm not here to tell you. Hey, you should all go out and hack your DNA or your dog's DNA or your Partner's DNA though. Don't do it And I'm also here to pour a little rain on the parade Where you might have gotten the impression that we have CRISPR now and you can just CRISPR DNA in any way You want and it will do what you want and no It doesn't so that was the bad news the good news is that some really cool things really are happening But we are not about to be in a place that you could modify modify my DNA and I would become thin You could however modify my DNA and I would be dead. That's entirely possible Let's not go there. So DNA Millions or billions of nucleotides or bases So we we all exist Contain around three point three billion bases of DNA That's what we always thought later We found out that some people have like six percent more DNA than other people there's a lot more variation between us than we thought this is relatively recent discovery and Well, our binary stuff is zero and one and DNA We have four molecules and we call them a cg and t and these are organized in chromosomes in cream genes and What blows my mind and it should blow your mind as well. And if it doesn't blow your mind, I will give you free beer We have four billion years of life and it is all using atom for atom the same DNA Now when I look back at my presentation five years ago I already could not read some of the files I had made because by the time the software had changed this is four billion year old code and It's still using the same molecules Yep, if that doesn't excite you, I don't know what will so there are some more analogies We have DNA DNA is like super stable We sometimes can dig up neanderthals or other ancient Organisms like a hundred thousand years ago and we can still read their DNA. I cannot read the CD-ROM from ten years ago Which contains less information so that is like super super solid stuff But it's so solid that like a CD-ROM it doesn't do anything by itself So there's RNA which is far more active form of DNA, but it degrades in days or hours From RNA. We built proteins. We are all proteins. We are a room full of proteins our skin our proteins our hair Our nails etc. So we are built out of proteins, but the proteins also do stuff That's really the doing things of life The components of life and these are made out of amino acids, which are like a little Lego blocks and You put them together and you get a protein So how much DNA is there? And this is a sort of impressive list. We have viruses like that are 800 bytes. These are true artists 800 bytes that can make you really ill and unhappy and And then of course there is the famous one SARS-CoV-2 7.4 kilobytes in the room with us right now Like almost guarantee it to you 7.4 kilobytes. It costs a little bit of disruption Then we go up to a bacterium 750 kilobytes It's just doable you can read a bacterium and people actually sort of go through all of the DNA for bacterium and learn stuff and we'll also do that later on and Typical human being is 750 megabytes and that goes for everyone. Even if you're a larger, it's still 750 megabytes of unique DNA So How do we go from DNA to these proteins that build us? And that's this little machine. This is the world's most impressive 3d printer. This is the ribosome And you see this chain that goes in that says Ah, that's not to read it that way and that goes through and that assembles the yellow Things that attract the purple or pink Amino acids that make these proteins Biologists are sometimes very strange people when the protein is small they call it a peptide and no one knows when it becomes a protein This is how they roll and They love messing with you I'll get some more examples of that so this little machine is a 3d printer Or actually it's a 1d printer because it takes this ribbon of RNA and turns it into a ribbon of Amino acids and Then interestingly this ribbon self assembles and folds itself up into all kinds of interesting shapes There was a lovely movie here. There is a lovely movie here that you can see but I cannot See if I can make it play Yes, it works. But this is the same thing in black. You see this RNA chain going through the machine Then all these things fly in and out They bring the amino acids and you see that gray thing coming up there And that is the amino the amino acids being assembled into a peptide or a protein And this just goes on and on and if you watch this presentation at home It goes on for multiple more minutes because all kinds of cool things. So now a thing flies in Let's see. Does it come? Well, it's taking its time Okay, you should just watch this at home. Ah, there you go. Whoop. Well, it just goes on and on and this happens within you right now Even as we speak Billions of proteins are being assembled now How do we know? How does the thing know? Yeah, is it working? Yeah, it's working This is the instructions for an important protein and it actually fits on one screen and And when this is made and then another protein is also made and if you want to impress biologists a Protein always starts with an M. So if you ever see one that doesn't start with an M You can say like you're wrong. Mr. Biologist Little trick. So here's another protein. It's a bit smaller and when these two assemble They combine into one of the most impressive materials known to man. I have it here for you human skin Which if you think about this, it's a really impressive piece of technology can stand water It doesn't tear it disinfects itself and the source code for a key part of that is on these two screens Continues to blow me away So this is a table of the op codes of an ancient CPU This tells you if you put these bytes into this CPU it will do the following things if you look at this table You can already see that some thought went into that So there are all all columns that are empty where the designers were probably planning to do new things but they left space and In some places they left a little bit of room in between so you can see some sort of structure in there if you study This you might understand something about the people that made the 6502 CPU we have this 2300 year old rock and on this are is one boring document written in two scripts of Egyptian and Ancient Greek and Because it's the same document three times this stone helps us understand how language developed Maybe three thousand years ago two thousand three hundred years ago. It's a very impressive rock This is the table that does DNA and amino acids and it's four billion years old This is a lot cooler than the rock If you stare at this thing The more you learn about this table so we see for example that Cgg maps to Argonine and You have these other few things there are TAA TAG and TGA map to stop codons that means the protein ends here stop whatever you were doing you're done There are three of them Probably very important The more you stare at this table the more you start to see structure in there and some people are really Convinced that someone designed this table. I don't think it was designed by someone But still the more I look at this table the more sort of impressive it becomes How do we know that it's four billion years old and we can actually trace the evolution of life We now think that it started in these sort of black smokers or some something close to that But we know from the way this split up that the code has not changed for at least two billion years and probably longer I Find that impressive Now finally we're gonna talk about hacking the genome and editing DNA Why would you even do it? Because if you mess with it you might make worse Well first there are people walking around and they have terrible diseases Probably some of you in the room have that and you would like to have that fixed And sometimes we just know there's this little bit of DNA that's wrong if only we could change one thing Your life would be a lot better But we also have people walking around with Unfavorable DNA that we know that you are at risk or maybe at risk of severe disease later in life You might not want to be at risk of severe disease disease later in life The other way we manipulate DNA is to get bacteria to work for us for free. There are our angels that way and We have that these bacteria to make vaccines hormones and medicines for us All the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that we got against corona Almost all of them came out of bacteria, which is very nice of them because usually we associate bacteria with bats things happening This is one of the good things happening We might one day also convince bacteria to fixate Carbon dioxide for us, which would be really nice because they can do that kind of thing If only we could tell them that they should do it and maybe one day they'll listen We also can manipulate DNA to instruct our immune system to fix cancer, which is nice and Finally, that's a part where it's gonna be lots of very active. You could also win the Tour de France If you want to modify your own DNA and there are also going to be people that needs bigger body parts And would like to manipulate their DNA and it's probably going to be happening. Don't do it So what could go wrong with DNA? Sometimes there's just a typo in there One thing changed. It's just one letter. It should be a C. It's a G and that could already disable a whole gene or It could the gene could still work, but now do the wrong thing The other thing that sometimes happens is there are people that come from regions where there was lots of malaria And they have DNA that protects them against malaria, which is nice That DNA might also give you a blood disease, which is not nice But it was a good trade-off when these people lived in or their forebears lived in countries with a lot of malaria One of the most terrible things that we recognize as computing people is let's say you have a serial connection serial connection and you miss one bit and Everything now shifts one bit That means that it becomes unintelligible Nothing useful ever comes out again DNA has the same Issue because it takes three DNA letters to make one amino acid if you take away one amino acid All sorry one DNA letter all the amino acids now shift and they all become wrong. This is very bad And sometimes you just get a mutation that means that the gene stops in the middle Which is not good because you were attached. You've also wanted the rest of it to work So how long have we been working with? Modifying genomes it turns out we've been doing this for thousands and thousands of years already Which is not what you might be expecting and For example, this this wonderful wolf Entered our lives and that thing downstairs is still substantially a wolf It's actually 99.9% wolf I did not improve I think But we were able to do this because there was enough genetic variation in the wolf That if you just sort all the sort of good bits or the bad bits from the wolf You end up with that thing. So that's not changing DNA. It's just moving it around The same thing we see all these lovely and healthy vegetables on the right. These are all one plant So the Brussels sprouts and the kale and the broccoli and the cauliflower are all one plant Except someone bred it to emphasize different parts of the plant But this is if you have a DNA sequencer at home, which I do You could sequence your Brussels sprouts and they would look look just like broccoli so This stuff all happened Thousands of years ago and it did not require any special laboratory stuff It just required sorting the variation that existed between the majestic wolf So you take the smallest wolf from the litter you take the nicest wolf from the litter and in the end you end up with that and There's a lot of variation in here and I'm gonna skip a few slides but this is a real picture and that sort of embodies the Genetic variation Within cows it is a real picture, but it must be said that the smaller ones are all Female cows and the big one is a steer, but still it's a very big cow and and this is just not manipulating DNA Just moving it around Skip this one as well Actually, so when people were breeding plants sometimes there was not enough genetic variation in the plant to make an interesting plant People were bored. They had lots of time and no regulation And at some point someone figured out that if you just put some radioactivity next to a plant it will mutate and this creates some lovely flowers and And this has been done for for decades already And I think there are like two thousand different plant species that were just generated by putting radiation into them and hoping that the plant would become better and It works don't do this on people They don't like it so this was like extra super super special Diabetic people of people with diabetes many of them need insulin and the insulin hormone is a very small protein It should be simple to make and we cannot do it. It's very interesting. We cannot do it We need to get animals to do it for us before 1979 or even before 1985 if you wanted to make insulin you had to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cows and pigs to get a tiny bit of insulin from them which was wasteful and smelly and it was not good and they didn't like it and Ridiculously early these people before they could even read DNA They had figured out how they could make the DNA that creates protein and Put it in bacteria and These bacteria then said oh well we still speak the language after four billion billion years We understand your DNA humans. We are now going to make insulin for you At first they only made a little bit of insulin until they understood that bacteria do speak the same DNA but they have a different dialect and By that I don't mean they speak a different language. Just they use different synonyms. So where Animal DNA uses a lot of GCC as a codon maybe the animals of the bacteria use a different one and In a ridiculously short amount of time they could stop slaughtering these hundreds of thousands of animals and now insulin gets made by Bacteria and sometimes by yeast Like very impressive. Well, how do you do that? How do you get the bacterium to take your DNA and listen to it? It turns out Bacteria also have sex So it's nasty enough to know already that we are sort of inhabited by bacteria, but they're also Doing things with their pillars and And and and This means that if you get a bacterium in the right mood it will just suck up DNA from the environment And you are not going to believe this but I swear it is true With one of the most used bacteria for this kind of stuff one way of getting them in the mood is to feed them alcohol it really is true, but The biologists continue to mess with you once they have found the bacterium that is willing to take up DNA from the environment By feeding it alcohol for example, they call it competent Which is not what happens to me when you feed me alcohol, but anyhow You give there are other ways to get them But this is one of the prime ways you give them ethanol and they suck up DNA from the environment and they think like hey Let's do this stuff Okay, so that's very nice because these things make hormones for us medicines vaccines. So thank you Adding DNA to humans because we'd love to hear about human beings. How can we fix our DNA? How can we improve our DNA and the thing is there are lots of viruses around that already want to improve our DNA? And we do not want that. We are against that So our DNA is very well protected has lots of defenses Against people messing with it, but there are a few viruses that can do it and one of the most famous one is HIV The one that gives you AIDS. It's like really good at inserting stuff in our DNA And so they started making medicines and stuff with that, but people were like are you injecting AIDS into me? So they now call them lentivirus Which is the same thing But it sounds a lot better. So if someone says this is a lentiviral based approach So you're like that's AIDS, right? But but still of course they took out all the scary bits and stuff. So it works but But still what this does is you take some DNA that you want to insert into a human being You put it into this lentivirus and that then goes to your genome and puts its stuff Somewhere That's a bit of a problem There are other viruses that do it slightly smarter There's a Mysterious a Dino associated vector that we don't really understand why it exists at all But is it a virus that takes a little bit of DNA and just leaves it in the nucleus doesn't insert It just leaves it there. It's like very nice and And there another way of doing it that was very disappointing to people They said it's gonna be like super hard to get DNA into a human cell Into it integrated and someone said can we try a really small injection needle? No, it's not gonna work and it's okay. It does work and So this is the fact that that works as the way you think it works Just someone with really good eyesight and and it works but the problem is that person can only do one cell at a time and To improve that they also these these biologists they cracked me up They they made a gun a DNA gun and they and they put little gold bowls in there coated with DNA and go and it's called biolistics and So that helps because that can do like like dozens of cells at the time But the problem is we we need to do a lot more than that and the challenge we have there It looks a little bit like this. These are so-called phone books They were massive data leaks when when sort of Telephone companies would print everyone's phone numbers in there and you can see this is a lot I estimated each of these books contains around 200 megabytes of information Which is slightly less than a human being but the challenge of editing a human DNA is that you must search and replace Through these books and through all of them You can see that it's gonna be real work Nevertheless we can do it Um sickle cell disease. This is the one I mentioned that if you have This makes you almost immune against malaria, but can give you very nasty blood disease and make you can make you extremely unhappy and this is now I Almost yeah, I think this is fixed. I think we got this we got a solution for it now But the reason why it works is you this is a rare case where you can take cells from your blood out of the Body into the lab in the lab. They infected those cells with viruses. They check it everything went right Then they make a lot more of these cells Then you go back to the patient Remove those cells from the patient. That's the scary part for a bit and then you put the fixed cells back in and It works. It works tremendously. Well, it's also tremendously hard work But it uses one of these lentiviruses and we know what that is to Insert a fixed gene and it mostly gets inserted in the right place Mostly that's the sort of scary part. So how well does this work? These are on the left are people before the treatment and every red Block there is a severe event where they had to visit the hospital because their sickle cell disease Got them bad enough that they had to go to the hospital and in yellow is the people that have been treated and there are no Red markers there anymore. Now. I have to warn you you will read a lot about Successful gene therapy and most of the successes are not that successful Most of the news is hyped up This is for real This is 100% score Maybe the light for 5% it's okay But this is an extremely impressive result where we were able to just Insert and improve the gene and improve people's life tremendously This one is also very impressive cancer. We hate it. Fuck cancer The way cancer survives is that it hides from our immune system if our immune system could recognize the cancer cells It would get rid of them What we can do with gene therapy is educate some of our immune cells and say look this is what you should be doing pseudo kill the cancer cell and it actually does that and This is not as successful As as this slide so we're not in this territory yet And it doesn't work for all cancers But when it works It's like tremendously impressive and it worked because we were able to tell an immune cell here are your DNA instructions This is what you should look for It's amazing I'm gonna skip this one because we mentioned it already except for the last paragraph This is a virus by which we can insert a tiny ring of DNA into a cell. It's very helpful from this virus The biggest challenge is it's like really tiny that means that only a very small payload fits in there Means if you want to exploit it if you want to put some shellcode in there. It has to be like super super brief Finally crisper who here has heard about crisper Yeah, well, it is nice. It really is nice Because it allows me to show you this picture This is a bacterial virus called a phage. That's for real They really look like this people like is this an artist impression while the color is an artist impression I have to admit that otherwise this bacterial virus actually looks like this and to prove that on the right. There is a photo It actually doesn't look like that. And how does a thing like this operate in the head? There is a bunch of DNA and then it does what you think it does it goes sits on a bacterium and then Drills down injects a DNA Really does that and bacteria they hate it they really don't like that and They want to put a stop to it So many bacteria have specific enzymes that recognize specific DNA sequences And when they say when I see that DNA sequence, I'm gonna kill it Which is somewhat of a problem because that means that the bacterium itself should not have that DNA sequence Because otherwise it would kill itself if you do a simple statistical analysis on any bacterium You find that they're actively avoiding Some sequences because they know it would kill them so and by the way I this is my own invention and and this you can do this as well if you download the DNA from a bacterium and you go Hunt for rare sequences you will find stuff and much of that stuff is not really known in the literature Because they are not big computer geeks over at biology and we are now CRISPR and This is CRISPR has been around for ages It has been around for billions of years, but we knew about it for a very long time already and the Biologists and I love them by the way I just don't to clarify that but they turn out their understanding was exactly the wrong way around Because we knew that CRISPR was there we could see it in bacteria, but we didn't know what it was doing and what it looks like is you have Bits of yellow repeating DNA they're not yellow in real life, but Repeating bits of DNA with some random stuff in between which they called spacers and Everyone was really interested in what are these yellow things doing and and these spacers It turns out the spacers are the immune system of the bacterium these spacers They have in be in them copies of small parts of the DNA from the viruses that attack them So in that DNA there's an instruction if you see the following DNA kill it and This can evolve it can learn from new phages But the risk of course is if you have this instruction if you see this DNA kill it Said you start killing yourself Which is like a virus scanner that detects itself because it's full of bad stuff and Nature has been clever about this it always adds a few DNA letters before the killing sequence Without actively mentioning them This is how the bacterium Prevents itself from killing itself It's like really nice So what does CRISPR actually do and I'm gonna skip a few slides, but I'm The key thing is you may think CRISPR is a thing that edits DNA That's probably this is that what what your impression was I think CRISPR. Yeah, I think so as well It doesn't it breaks DNA The only thing he does it breaks DNA. That's what it does So if you think like hey, I'm gonna edit my genes with DNA That's a bit like I'm gonna edit edit my genes with dynamite I will tear them apart and The trick that we do is we make the DNA kill itself and CRISPR and then it's like really broken and When that happens we also inject Sort of suggestion to the cell. Why don't you fix it like this and Then the cell because it's like super broken Sometimes takes up our suggestion and fixes itself So that's really nice, but if anyone tells you that CRISPR is there to manipulate DNA CRISPR is only there to break DNA So The hype around CRISPR if you hear from California that people are ready to CRISPR yourself into health We're not there yet. We're not there in a long way But in a lab it does work so you can do many things with it in a lab But you cannot just shoot the CRISPR cannon at someone and hope that it changes all your DNA And in fact when you do that if you deliver a CRISPR payload if you inject it or whatever your body goes like oh, we need to break this down send it to the liver Which means that the liver is the only place that we can really CRISPR right now That's a good thing that the liver is one of your top 10 organs So it is good news that we can add it there, but that's the only thing we can do with it So it is not as hot as you would think now more doom Do we understand how DNA really powers life? Because if you're gonna change it, it's best if you knew what it was doing and Sometimes we do and I really like this one. This is an important algorithm Should I go to the kitchen? I should go to the kitchen if I'm hungry and if there is food there It's an important human algorithm You shouldn't go to the kitchen if you're not hungry and you should also not go there if there is no food and In expressed in a sort of sea like language if I am hungry and there's food in the kitchen go to the kitchen We find this exact algorithm in bacteria This is a piece of DNA and If we are hungry if the bacterium is hungry that cap thing attaches to the DNA and it says can you please make this protein? But that's only the first condition. Am I hungry? The other condition is there actually something we can do about the hunger and that's when there is lactose around if there is lactose around Then the bacteria says, okay, I'm hungry. There's lactose. I'm going to convert glucose I'm gonna make glucose from the lactose. We understand this one really well. That's because bacteria are nice Bacteria are simple bacteria are like these tiny computer programs that we all rely on Human beings are these giant blocks of Java Enterprise shit And we have no idea what they're doing We're all made out of Java people and I want to give you a real example When we started to look at well when we when the human genome was first sequenced We thought we would find a list of all diseases in there So this is the gene that makes you fat. This is the gene that makes you smart It works nothing like that and one of the first things people try to figure out is well What causes blue eyes because it's a very simple thing to test you can just look at someone Do you have blue eyes and then you can look at their DNA and see can I find in the DNA? What gives you blue eyes or not and low we found it. We found a very powerful Mutation and it gives you blue eyes So where is this mutation? Is it in a gene that has anything to do with ice? No, it is in the Herk 2 gene which is involved with DNA repair So there is a mistake or a change in the Herk 2 gene and That gives you a different eye color, which is makes no sense at all Then we found out that if you make this small change in the Herk 2 gene The Oka 2 gene becomes less active Well, thanks for that That's like yeah, I only changed this little thing and now the whole stack is down I don't know why But anyhow this tiny change in the Herk 2 suppresses the Oka 2 gene What does the Oka 2 gene do? Well, it makes the P protein What does the P protein do? We don't know Something something with color it also changes some other things in your life in the color But we don't really know So that means that this is our level of understanding and this is actually one of the best studied Mutations we have because it's one of the first one that was discovered and it is caused by a mutation in an unrelated gene That suppresses a gene that we don't really know what it does, but it gives you blue eyes So be careful when you tinker with DNA Strange things might happen Because this is the other pie chart that tells us what is all that DNA doing and The red part the tiny part over there. That's the part that we are reasonably sure what it's doing and then there is stuff and A lot of this stuff can be compared to if you have an old computer project And you have lots of files around and you change it a few times. There are now three directories called MISC and And there's actually once once we revamped it all but we didn't finish it But we left the files around because they might be useful later on That's a lot of what you see in DNA a lot of the other parts you see in DNA So all kinds of viruses that have successfully infected the DNA have meanwhile been killed, but yeah It's just we still keep it around for some reason There are a few plants that have cleaned up their whole genomes and kicked out everything that wasn't immediately useful And we have very much not done so But it turns out that these parts are important because if there are changes in there it turns out that we do change For example, the the blue eye gene is actually in a part of her to that actually doesn't do anything But it does change your eye color Hmm the future Will you hack a genome and will it be yours? Is it loading yeah, this is stuff you can buy online. This is the bento lab on the left. It's really nice Mini PCR on the right. This is pocket PCR. This is USB powered PCR machine, you know from the DNA tests You can just buy it and it's super fun I have all of these things and I've done my force DNA experiments at home and I'm not even good at this kind of stuff But I was able to just detect DNA and and and see what was in there and it works And you can just order this stuff online. It's still somewhat special, but The machine on the right is actually a DNA sequencer that will read DNA and it is actually this big and I pondered bringing it, but then I thought about how stuff breaks on campsites So I didn't bring it, but you can buy that thing and read DNA in your own house If you want to order DNA, you can go to this site Eurofins You can just paste the DNA in there and click order and then they send it to you and then the billing process is extremely complicated I don't know why but the ordering of the DNA is rather easy This is you can buy this thing crisper at home and It's meant for a crispering plants so you can do some experiments with that stuff But you can order this and and do it So it is coming closer to our world But don't do it because it will likely kill you or give you cancer. So this I want to as a disclaimer You can order this stuff, but don't do it there are some people however that are willing to take risks and many of them are in the Tour de France and And there are a bunch of genetic modifications that you could make to your red blood cells that might very well improve your cycling performance and I think that these people also looked at this page like well, you know If I don't win the next stage, then what's what's worth? What's my life worth? Anyhow? So but the only way you're gonna figure that out is you if you actually sequence the DNA from a Tour de France Cyclists and see that they changed You're okay. You have new DNA now. So weird some predictions Like I said, you might get the impression that we can just simply crisp are your hair color soon and probably not But the stuff from the sickle cell disease and this pseudo kill a cancer cell stuff That is going extremely fast right now And that spent like 10 years in the lab, but it's now coming out of the lab and actually curing people So you'll be hearing a lot more about that And but we will continue to focus on terrible disease because we're not quite ready yet To modify someone's DNA so that they get a bigger nose In the future You might get you might enter the territory that people say we can change your DNA because it will lower your risk of future disease And that might be something that is worth it for for some people, but this is already like 10 years in the future and But the thing is so these are developments for like the next 10 years But I'm a bit worried about the lower line because this technology is now so widely known There might be people not only Tour de France people or just people with very scary diseases that have hope And of course the hope is we want to give people hope, but it is now easy enough to to mess up your DNA So summary we can make bacteria sing and dance for us if we give them a little bit of alcohol And and they make things for us, which is nice We can fix DNA cells in the lab And that has saved the lives of many people now because I could not even address all the ways in which this has worked It is a lot harder to fix a living human being But there are viruses that are willing to help and it might well be that in the future We find a virus that is precise enough that will deliver a fixed gene in the right place because right now it delivers It's somewhere we understand very little about what most of DNA does and We should be very careful tinkering with that and the final line is really your digital skills are really welcome in this field so If you study DNA, it is entirely possible as an outsider with only a few years of hard work to actually discover something that other people haven't seen because we are not scared of like hundreds of gigabytes of DNA and And we have a reverse engineering mindset That can very well be helpful And with that I would like to end my presentation and thank you for your wrapped attention Excellent are there is even time for questions are there questions? There are microphones in the middle and I can't really see if there is anybody there And Otherwise if there are no questions, please please if you have a question, please walk to the microphone. Yes microphone one not working Can you please perhaps even move up because on the stream we won't have any audio Can you there's another microphone in the back? That one does work. Yeah in the presentation at some point you showed there were two Lifeforms with one of them having three thirty three gigabytes. Yeah, you just crossed it Yeah, there the bottom two ones. Yeah, I was interested to find out why why so much That's an extremely good question and for the marble lung fish people are not actually sure if it's only one fish It might be actually two fishes with one genome. We're not really sure but the other thing is that There is a theory that says that the more DNA you have The more variation you can harvest Which means that you could see and this is an information theoretical approach That you can see DNA as an antenna for harvesting potential information about improvements And in a way, it might be good to have a lot of DNA It might also be Accidents history biology is full of weird accidents and it is not unique So it's not 33 gigabytes of unique DNA. It's lots of copies of the same DNA But the honest answer is we don't know Thanks, and thanks for the great presentation. There's a lineup. Yes next So hi, so you're saying that we can help right and so in what specific ways would Software engineering skills be useful like what specific things I can give you a very nice example of that There are some times that biologists they do Research on five bacteria and they report well in these five bacteria The following restricted sequences are present and we write a whole paper about these five bacteria And you can read that paper you can go to the website of the NC bi which is the US agency that gathers all these genomes and Repeat the analysis not on five bacteria, but in 32,000 of them and We can do that because we know how computers work and if we want to rent a big one We rent a big one and suddenly you just Amplified their work by a factor of thousands and probably find lots of cases where their hypothesis is correct But it's not correct and this is simply a matter of scaling up work That was very difficult for those people and that could be easy for you And then you would maybe learn something about bacteria that before that we just didn't know Thank you. Hello. Sorry. I missed most of the of your for truck but I'm imagining that when we managed to Manage the climate crisis afterwards. We should take care about plutonium and collecting it So and I imagine that we could create creatures or a food chain that would partially eat plutonium and collected and that way Collected so we can harvest it and put it together in one place whatever and treat it some more some way which we have to invent What's your thought about it? This is a scary scary thought for you that we could one day Create a creatures or even food chain for this specific And that's good. Yeah, I so the question I think is could this be like really scary and Could be for example make a bacterium that just eats plastic Which would be nice for the bacterium, but it would sort of suck for all our plastic things. I think with plastic It would be very different to Draw the barrier between plastic and non-plastic things So this would be very dangerous in my opinion I think you're right and we're still struggling with it So the European Union has really said you need to get permission to do anything with Jean So all this stuff I just described is a ton of paperwork in the European Union and not in the US I'm not convinced that the paperwork we are letting people do here is even good enough to make sure that nothing scary happens But just to we could talk about it all night, but I'm pretty convinced that this stuff could be like really scary Yes Don't do it. Don't do it. That's how Is there a last short question we have only time for one I I hope it's short. No, no For your blue eye example, you said there is some junk DNA that normally does nothing Yeah, but in this case it does. Yeah, so it obviously Doesn't do nothing. Yeah, my question would be how do we even determine which Parts of the DNA do nothing. Yeah, so we don't There is one as one answer to it We can take a cell and look at all the DNA that is currently being converted into RNA, which means that it's active and Then we check if we can find that RNA in the DNA and if we do you end up as one of the red protein coding thing or as the Well No, there's not it's not explicit here, but we can only really know the stuff that we see that is active and for the rest We don't know what the influence is so and also I I sure if I said that it did nothing then I should not have said that it is stuff that we don't immediately know what this for This concludes that I think we have to conclude now because of the time. Thank you all Yeah, I'm around outside. So if you have more questions, you can just please please follow bad outside. Thank him again for this great talk