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Re:The Weirdness of CRISPR by phkahler on Sunday April 02, 2017 @06:53PM (#14019502)
Do humans have the same low level immune system bacteria have? It seems like passing immunity between generations would be extremely unlikely, but it could still be useful for offering some immunity to viruses that one has already had.

Would it be possible to introduce a genetic template from a viral disease into an embryo to produce a human essentially immune to that virus?

Re:The Weirdness of CRISPR by Ultimatt on Monday April 03, 2017 @02:08AM (#14020905)
CRISPR is a solution to just retroviruses. Bacteria through phages actually come under more attack than humans in this way. If you've got a single cell for the next generation you care a lot about this. Humans any old crap can happen to litterally trillions of cells without affecting the germ line. CRISPR itself has capacity to introduce damage to the genome.

So its a balance between error correction and error introduction. In Bacteria its worth it, in humans not so much, especially as we have a bunch of other subtler more complex ways of handling viruses before they get all the way to the nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_interference Bacteria dont have this luxury as their DNA lacks this extra barrier. The biggest difference is simply cells dont matter in a human and can just kill themselves if all else fails.

The rest of the "innate" immune system has similar proteins involved nearly everywhere e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-like_receptor These are the components involved in cell surface recognition of sugars. But much more similar between all animals than animals and bacteria.

Answer to your second question is yes you could add a CRISPR construct with templates for known disease and add artificial immunity. However, finessing this so that CRISPR doesnt cause lots of damage from randomly cutting your DNA throught your life leading to a higher risk of systemic cancers... is a big hurdle.

Re:The Weirdness of CRISPR by Para2016 on Sunday April 02, 2017 @07:03PM (#14019531)
There is something in humans called Dicer - which is an enzyme that uses RNA to cause RNA interference. It has a role in destruction of viruses that use RNA. Here's a short wiki about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicer

Re:The Weirdness of CRISPR by pazimzadeh on Monday April 03, 2017 @01:13AM (#14020730)
This paper claims to have found RNA interference in mammals (https://cl.ly/jq5X). This paper is an attempt to refute the first paper (https://cl.ly/jq5T).

The crux of the debate is that mammals have the interferon system to respond to viruses, so why would they have kept around a system like CRISPR?