Breakthrough DNA Editor Borne of Bacteria

TL;DR: Some bacteria use their DNA as a database of bad viruses for identification purposes. This way of editing DNA has been replicated artificially and it's called CRISPR. Awesome.

Nature is full of interesting goodies. My favorite is the discovery taq polymerase from thermophile bacteria that lives on thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean.<p><a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Polymerase_chain_reaction</a><p>Another form of code reuse!<p>I also wonder what amazing things we could find in rare&#x2F;niche ecosystems giving that in such a short time we&#x27;ve seen things like this and rapamycin.

Interestingly, someone else holds a patent for this.<p><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-owns-the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;featuredstory&#x2F;532796&#x2F;who-own...</a>

This is going a bit off-topic, but the more I read about these new insights into the workings of single-celled life, the more I get the feeling that on the cellular level, we multicellular organisms are like nations. The more sophisticated ones, like us, being like an ethnically homogeneous and very xenophobic society in a totalitarian state with closed borders). Meanwhile, the single-celled ecologies out there function like some kind of anarchic jungle society were everyone is self-reliant.<p>It kind of makes me wonder what the future of human society holds.

&gt; Barrangou and his colleagues found that the bacteria had stuffed DNA fragments from the two viruses into their spacer<p>Sounds almost Lamarckian, doesn&#x27;t it?

What about this: sequence a tumour, find a distinguishing part of its genome. Make a virus that search and replaces that with self destructing genes. Inject into tumour.

This is something that some people has suspected in the field for a long time. I had terrible discussions as we made some software in the field and met people there.<p>The pure Darwinism evolution dogma has extended a lot because it was an easy answer, like the world being created in 6 days. But it was incomplete in lots of ways.<p>For example, considering all DNA we did not understand as &quot;junk&quot; DNA was incredible arrogant, when it seems like it is in fact software or other kinds of data.<p>You have comments on me on hacker news talking about that like 5 years ago or something.<p>Great job what those researchers have done.