Can an Artificial 24th Pair of Chromosomes Create Superior Beings?

[Mike AkA Don]

I saw Doom the movie last night and there was an interesting concept in it.

They said that an artificial 24th pair of chromosomes was created to manufacture greater beings, they were basically far more superior.

And I thought, is this possible? Could chromosomes be added or change to make a hybrid human of some sort? Make a copy of an athlete's genetics or a genius's?

 

[iansmith]

In 1997, a group researchers were able to add small artificial chromosome into a human cell.

http://www.ess.ucla.edu/huge/HAC.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9090378&query_hl=2

So the chromosome that you insert in the genome will be carrying whatever you may want. It has been one way that people were looking into for genetic therapy. The problem is to known the effect the gene you are adding will have the organims.

For more info http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12044361&dopt=Citation

Quick search on pub-med
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...an+artificial+chromosome&tool=QuerySuggestion

 

[quasi426]

Theoritically it is possible to add say a 24th chromsome in humans to make them well different then 23 chromsome humans. However it is very complicated because you have to know that certain things are going to work a certain way like:
(1)The regulation of gene expression. Which is not understood at this point because it involves when a gene is expresed, how much of the gene should be expressed, how long should expression stay on/off, WHAT specific cells should the gene be expressed in.

(2)Expression involves more then just transcribing the DNA into mRNA. Because the mRNA has varying stability or half-life, it also can be modified it has to get trasported to the right part of the cell.

Anyway I going to stop with the laundry list. But the above was just all the requirements for a specific gene. But you see no cell just expresses one gene, but rather a myriad of genes are being expressed and they all interact with each other meaning that gene expression of one gene is usually a function of gene expression of many other genes which in turn are a function of many other genes. This can get very complicated very quickly.

The most studied organism is a unicellular organism by the name of E.coli. We still do not understand exactly how this "simple" organism functions entirely. We cannot make a computer model that will mimic all the functions and interactions in E.coli because we don't know them all yet.

 

[Dr.Brain]

Would it make any difference if the 24th pair of chromosome is a sex-chromosome or an autosome?