MEXICO: The more scientists learn about how our genes build our bodies, the better they get at hacking this process. Right now, they’re already adept enough to restore vision to blind mice.
Gene therapy is powerful new technique by which doctors may one day be able to use the body’s own machinery to cure disease. In many cases, a disease boils down to a malfunctioning gene or set of genes, and could be fixed by inserting working genes to pick up the slack.
In the case of the blind mice, the vision cells in their eyes were destroyed. The eye contains two key types of vision cells: rods, which detect light intensity, and cones, which detect color. These cells enable sight because they contain special pigment molecules that react with light, and this reaction gets converted into a chemical signal that tells your brain what’s going on.
So researchers packaged the gene for a light-detecting pigment called rhodopsin, found in functional rod cells, inside a virus. The DNA within that virus also contained specific genetic instructions that tell the gene that is can only switch on when it’s inside particular cells in the eye. These cells are deeper within the eye than rods and cones and don’t naturally sense light.
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