Not too related, but I got my genome sequenced for fun the other day (< $500 for 30x whole genome), and after a few scrolls through the results (200+ interpretations of my genome in the context of studies like the one linked here), I'm already losing interest.
Ok, so I have a high genetic predisposition for thinness, walking fast [0], and bipolar disorder? So now what? I never noticed except for the thinness. They even scared me with 'you're genetically in the 99th percentile for critical covid disease progression,' but reading the results of the paper in question, it turned out the heritability of the effect under study was only 6%. Thanks for letting me know.
These studies are interesting from a general genomics perspective, but not so much yet from a personal one (with the exception of a few traits that are determined by one or a few well-understood genetic variants. Hopefully this space will expand over the next few decades).
Looking corn farming's environmental impact in the US (eutrophication & Gulf of Mexico deadzone, top soil erosion, biodiversity losses), I wouldn't be so sure.
Unfortunately, small amount of sugar = even smaller amount of useful product. I.e. for all we know the yields/cell densities (not reported) are so low that you need more land to grow sugarcane and coconut trees than to grow the amount of coffea plants needed for a similar amount coffee.
- Yes, doing this at a meaningful scale will require large bioreactors with a price tag of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. You will need LOTS of those reactors to get production beyond 1% of the world's current coffee consumption.
- With all of these, one has to ask what the point is if the bioreactor inputs are sugar (from plants) and other nutrients. If you want sustainability benefits for X where X = plant-based product, you're probably better off improving the current agricultural practices of growing X rather than growing X in a bioreactor.
- That's one of the loftier visions in biotech: decentralized manufacturing of basically anything. Anything along the lines of a convenient personal bioreactor currently seems like it might as well be a century away or more, but I'd certainly be an early adopter:)
> this project has been part of our overall endeavor to develop the biotechnological production of daily and familiar commodities that are conventionally produced by agriculture.
I'm afraid I have to call BS. The nutrient medium used to feed the cell cultures will contain glucose or sucrose most likely from industrially-grown corn or sugarcane as a carbon source and other nutrients.
I.e. in this case biotech isn't getting rid of an agricultural production process and magically replacing it with something sustainable - it's simply shifting the agricultural supply chain more upstream and out of view.
Could it still be more sustainable compared to traditional coffee growing? I doubt it very much given all the input required to run commercial-scale bioreactors. Those things are energy intensive, produce waste water, and require complex nutrient broths and sterility. If you're claiming sustainability benefits in such a fuzzy situation, at least have an LCA to back up the claims.
What about commercial feasibility? Extremely unlikely. Most if not all of the dealbreakers recently outlined in the context of commercial-scale lab-grown meat will apply here too [0].
But perhaps they can bioengineer some novel coffee characteristics unobtainable otherwise and sell it for $500 a cup.
It will be interesting to see how the immune response develops for previously covid-naive vaccinated people after their first covid infection. Specifically, does their immune system still adapt to new variants?
One of the main arguments of controversial anti-covid vaccine people like Geert vanden Bossche is that the immune response generated by the vaccine may thwart the immune system in generating an effective response to future variants after infection[0].
I don’t have enough insight into the immune system’s intricacies to evaluate whether such claims might be legit, but once variants start to emerge that really evade most of the current vaccine-induced immune response, this question will become increasingly important.
People line up every year to get a new flu shot because seasonal influenza keeps mutating the part of its hemagglutinin protein where most neutralizing antibodies bind after exposure to a vaccine that carries the entire hemagglutinin protein (embedded in a weakened/inactivated influenza virus).
Sure, spike ain't hemagglutinin and corona ain't no influenza, but let's not pretend there's no precedent at all for proteins mutating to the point that vaccines become ineffective.
Spontaneously, yes - fairly amazing. But what if the person treated with the mRNA vaccine happens to be infected with another RNA virus that is producing reverse transcriptase enzymes to convert its own RNA into DNA?