Genetic diseases: How scientists are working to make DNA repair (almost) a piece of cake

By Camille Bouchard, Université Laval

I have always been fascinated by genetics, a branch of biology that helps explain everything from the striking resemblance between different members of a family to the fact that strawberry plants are frost-resistant. It’s an impressive field!

I also have a personal connection to genetics. Growing up, I learned that members of my family had a form of muscular dystrophy called dysferlinopathy. I watched as my mother gradually lost the ability to climb stairs and had to use a cane, then a walker, and finally a wheelchair to get around. Her leg muscles were less and less able to repair themselves and became weaker with time.

My parents explained to me that all these changes were due to the error of a single letter among the billions of letters in a long DNA sequence. This error prevents the production of the protein responsible for repairing arm and leg muscles.

Today, I am a doctoral research student in molecular medicine. I study the treatment of hereditary diseases in order to be able to help families like my own. In this article, I will demystify hereditary diseases and show what research is being carried out to treat them.

A piece of cake? Not quite

Let’s start by imagining DNA as a recipe book. Each gene represents a different recipe. The page with the chocolate cake recipe has a nice picture, but there is some information missing. The recipe says to preheat the oven and measure the flour, but the rest of the page is torn. So it is impossible to make the cake. We go ahead and serve our meal made from all the other recipes, but there is no chocolate cake even though this is a particularly important part of the meal.

The same is true for hereditary diseases. In this case, the body can make all the proteins it needs except one. In dysferlinopathy, which affects my family, the missing recipe is the protein that repairs the muscles of the arms and legs.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/genetic-diseases-how-scientists-are-working-to-make-dna-repair-almost-a-piece-of-cake-219683