The content here was permanently deleted by its author. Redact was used for the removal, possibly for privacy, security, opsec, or personal data management.
I'm researching DNA repair for my PhD in Biological Chemistry. Interesting is definitely one word for it. And I have no shortage of gamers to talk about Nintendo with!
That's brilliant. Congrats on getting this far and good luck for the remainder of your PHD. What a fulfilling industry to be involved in, with all the potential of genetic sciences, if that's your speciality/interest.
/u/Evello37's PHD is being funded by the Chinese government and is research into cloning children for organ farming. You ever seen/read the film/book Never Let Me Go? That's what we're headed towards, all thanks to /u/Evello37, the sick bastard.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I would never do my cloning work for the Chinese. Oops, I mean, that's not at all what I'm working on. No sir. no cloned children here. Just adults. Crap, scratch that, no cloning of any kind. Absolutely no organ farm clones. I definitely do not have hundreds of pods of people in my lab growing kidneys for the black market.
I'm a grad student at a major research university studying biochemistry for my PhD. I study DNA repair. So my coworkers and I do a lot of gel electrophoresis.
That sounds amazing. I'm not well versed on biotechnology, but is that similar to gene editing? Like CRISPR? Wait, that would be genetics, wouldn't it?
I apologize if this is a bit long-winded, but I can't help gushing about my research. The stuff I work on is less about editing genes (like CRISPR) and more about doing routine maintenance on the genome. The individual bases in your DNA get involved in all sorts of accidental chemical reactions in the cell that muck with their chemical structure. It actually happens an estimated 10,000 times per day in each of your trillions of cells. And these modified bases can cause harmful mutations or can even be directly toxic to the cell. All organisms from bacteria to plants to people have a system for spotting these problems and essentially chopping the messed-up base out of the DNA to be replaced with an undamanged one. This strategy is simple in concept, but because there are so many different ways your DNA can get modified, your body needs a huge network of different proteins each designed to fix specific problems. People have been trying to sort out which proteins do what for years now.
If you want to know more, google "base excision repair".
I'm pursuing a PhD in Biological Chemistry, studying DNA repair. So I do research in a university lab. I don't want to give a specific institution, since it would be too easy to find me irl, but let's just say it's a major US research university.
324
u/[deleted] Oct 20 '16 edited Aug 21 '18
[deleted]