Hacker News Reader

I wonder if CRISPR tech could mitigate some of the dangers of inbreeding.

It won't.

Can somebody talk more about this? I'm interested and don't know much about it.

I am a lay person so please don't just trust what I'm saying, but don't think you need to be an expert in the field to deduce why it won't happen.

First of all, there's no money in it. So the technical reasons, whatever they are, don't really matter.

Second, I don't think it's that simple to just apply CRISPR to this problem, like CRISPR is some kind of magic bullet. This would be asking way more of CRISPR than previous experiments by orders of magnitude. It would be like asking the Wright brothers when they're going to scale their flying technology to get to Mars.

You are in the right track. To actually make CRISPR/CAS-9 work for "reduce inbreeding" issues, we would need to understand how the whole animal genome operates and all possible connections between genes and define what are the recessive genes that might cause some anomaly in the selection coefficient and decrease it.

Without this map, how would we are going to be able to use a technique that alters genes and efficiently change nucleotides to avoid recessive traits?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com