Analysis Of The Movie Gattaca

Congenital Heart Defect

Introduction

In the fictional movie “Gattaca”, the setting takes place in a time era where DNA serves as the prominent primary role to determine social class levels. Vincent Anton Freeman, the main protagonist, suffers from genetic discrimination due to his non-genetic engineered DNA, resulting in myopia, congenital heart defect, and a life expectancy of only 30 years. In order to prevent more genetic deficiencies on future babies, it is necessary to ensure genetic advantages by employing a solution to heart diseases.

Problem

Congenital heart defect (CHD) is a type of inherited illness resulting in the dysfunctions of heart structure, initially presented at birth. The abnormalities of the genome is generally passed

(ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) The human heart is made out of 4 chambers: two atria and two ventricle. These muscular organs are designed to plump blood across the body, which serves to normal blood regulation. When congenital heart defect occurs, the severity of the disease varies from relatively small threat such as holes between chamber partition to the more severe malformation such as the complete absence of chambers or valves, which requires immediate surgery. Symptoms of heart deflect includes the shortness of breath and the inability to contribute to extreme exercise. CHD warning symptoms consists of serious physical changes and behavior, the infants have high possibility of experiencing bluish tint in their

This technique corrects the mutation in the MYBPC3 gene, which is a protein-coding gene that is commonly associated to heart diseases. There are two essential opponents required in this editing system: the Cas9 nuclease enzyme, which inactivates a process that allows bacteria to open and alter genomes of the invading viruses, and a guide RNA sequence (allelebiotech.com). The guide RNA (sgRNA) consist of 20 nucleotide variable regions that provides the target site specificity. Seen from figure 2, before fertilization (the process where the egg and sperm fuse together), a genetic engineered nucleases, or “molecular scissor” will be inserted into oocytes with the sperm. The injected gene-editing component contains non-mutated versions of MYBPC3, inserted directly under the metaphase Il stage of the cell cycle. The maternal gene will be used as a guide template for repairing. Then, as shown in figure 3 below, the molecular scissor will cleave a double strand break (DSB) at the targeted DNA sequence area in the genomic site. The formation of the DSB activates either the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway, or the homology-direct repair (HDR) pathway, which both serves as the main DNA-repair pathways. In this case, the NHEJ pathway is generally avoided