[Music]
hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Emma and Jasmin to talk about genes mutations and whether some mutations are beneficial or not this episode kind of came about initially because I read an article that essentially said we're all mutants and by middle age each cell in your body will have accumulated around a
thousand genetic errors Emma you're a biophysicist studying things related to this so what can you tell us yeah so um biophysicist but also I guess my background is somewhat in biology explicitly with my fancy a level um in biology so that's where you kind of learn a lot about um DNA so I feel like I've done a lot of like Theory during that but then actually now every day when I go in the lab I use DNA and I kind of work with that as a part of my experimental technique so I think when
you said that we're all mutants I think it's a really nice tagline so I was very excited to join on this episode I think I've got probably an a level biology uh so high school level where you learn about how cells divide I remember it being strangely complicated with lots of words but it was a long time ago when I studied it it's a weird one and Jasmine uh you're a chemical engineer so I guess you probably don't know as much about this as Emma does so what's your
interest chemical engineer and also I start biology at GCSE level so um very long time ago yeah I'm just interested in like the mutations or whether or not we could actually like Humanity could end up like mutants like in the X-Men or other comic heroes so I just want to know like can we be superhuman through mutations nice this is something I wonder about as well I feel like it's probably quite farfetched that we'd end up being able to fly or you know if you
get bitten by a spider you end up with super powers like Spider-Man oh laser eyes oh yeah all these weird physical Feats that don't seem to quite make sense with Biology control the weather with your mind yeah and I kind of think that any change in human biology would probably happen quite slowly so you wouldn't see this sudden people wake up and suddenly you're able to do something super human because it's all about Evolution right so you might evolve a superpower with time but maybe not so
going back to the article I read about these genetic errors amongst other things mentions cell division and how that can bring changes to genes in there so this is essentially about cells copying themselves uh and it said that um 4 million cells divide every second which sounds like a lot but then I read that there are about 30 to 40 trillion cells in the human body so only a tiny fraction about one in a million I think uh is dividing at any one time if that
maths is correct it does make sense to me when you think about the numbers and I guess this is where I I can hopefully come in and say maybe what cell division actually is and what's happening because laa you are exactly right there's so many like fancy words and it's like a cycle and they all end in Phase um and essentially all that's happening in our cells when they divide is first of all the DNA gets replicated then other things get replicated and then the cell
actually just doubles in size and then pulls apart so all this happening is our DNA unzips itself finds some more strands of DNA to form these two lovely new strands and so another fact I can actually throw out is that in each of our cells there is 2 meters of DNA so if you think about how much DNA has to actually Compact and fit in and how many different things need to be read at a time I feel like it makes quite a bit of sense that when you're trying to actually copy each strand of DNA you're
going to get some errors and some things maybe that you don't want happening to just start arising yeah I mean I remember R out the time I was doing my levels decades ago um this was when there was a lot of talk about the Human Genome Project which was to map the entire Human Genome which they said would fill like phone books worth like if you printed it out I feel like a lot of people won't know what phork is now cuz they've gotten quite slim this is a bad example but 20 odd
years ago this was a big thing no I remember hearing about it when I was doing some studies as well and I still think I'm quite amazed that they actually managed to do it in the end um because there just is so much information and I don't even know how you even go about actually extracting all of that to figure out the different bases and everything like that yeah and I guess figuring about variations between populations as well you can't just take one person's DNA and map it
and say right job done you'd have to take a decent sample of the population right yeah for sure and actually one thing I was going to mention in our DNA it's made up of these Bas pairs that maybe people know so like a C and G I mean the phone book of the human Juno would just be a series of those letters just repeating in random orders how information is stored in DNA is actually really clever so the three bases code for one amino acid and so a whole chain
of DNA would code for a protein that can then execute a function in the cell or something like that but um something to know about DNA is you actually have some DNA which codes for things and some which are kind of turned off so even if you know your whole genome it's actually really hard to predict what characteristics you're going to have because you can express the gene for I don't know black and blonde hair and then I mean I I don't if that's a good example cuz I'm not a biologist but more
like the Genome Project is so interesting because it tells you a lot without actually you being able to extract much about it I feel like we're probably just saying a whole load of biology Buzz words and Jasmine saying what yep many words that I do not understand no I think essentially we're saying DNA is acids and they tell your body to make proteins and sometimes they don't tell your body to do that it's probably a really simple version of what Emma just said I think I understand that
it's a bit like a a recipe that basically says you're going to need these ingredients these five ingredients and then when you actually get to the recipe it's like we're only going to use three of those so it's like you have everything but it's not always used if that makes sense it does in my cookery world yes I do this all the time I don't have that ingredient I'll just not do that thing I'll use this thing instead but I guess if we get back to um this cell division thing I'd read that it
takes around about 24 hours for most types of cell in the human body to divide and I had kind of wondered if I could get to the point where I could calculate well how long does it take for the like your entire body to you say but apparently that's a silly question to ask because biology doesn't quite work like that it doesn't have that doesn't work on that beat of a drum say so 24 hours for most types of cell to divide is the best I could get and they only do
when it's necessary which is something I didn't quite understand what counts is necessary I don't know if that's something even counted Emma you know what I actually don't think it is maybe it does make sense for them not to just constantly keep on dividing but I feel like some cells like the lifetime of a cell like the there's going to be a time it doesn't work as efficiently and then it might divide and kind of regrow and renew um but I feel like that analogy of
things cells constantly dividing your body is it's a bit like the if you have a broom and you replace the head and you replace the stick how many times is it the same broom it's kind of like our body is constantly this Dynamic state of new and old cells which is really cool so you're never really the same person you're always taking a new material to renew parts of yourself which I guess is kind of where Jasmine's question about could we all become superpowered mutants
comes in because that change is always happening although you don't really see it I think the sometimes you don't see it as a great point for me to maybe actually Define to Jasmine and to the audience what a mutant and a mutation of your DNA actually means and the way I learned it initially is you can have three different types of mutation so in your like sequence of DNA you can have an extra amino acid th in you can have one taken out or you can actually have
one swapped out for other things which basically means that it doesn't have an effect so we probably are having a lot of mutations that just don't seem to have change any effect on our body um and we'll actually never know if that's even happening which then makes the Human Genome Project even more impressive that they managed to map it all yeah I mean I remember from uh when I was doing a lot of radiation chemistry uh although I wasn't working on biology DNA um I
listen to a lot of presentations of other people that were and and they talked about how um when radiation interacts with your body it's not necessarily the radiation itself that causes damage to the DNA it's the way it breaks down water or other molecules in your body to create um reactive chemicals often called radicals and it's those radicals that then can break Bonds in your DNA that lead to a sort of damage and some of it's really short term but then there are longer term
processes that happen it sounds like it gets really complicated really quickly so I don't have any specific information even hearing about that though and like I guess more of a chemistry and the radiation side of it is just things that like I've never even thought of because I've just worked with it so like biology or I need this in the lab so I'm just going to put some DNA in there and like I don't actually really think a lot of the times about different environments
that DNA is thrown in and how it has to kind of manage how do all these xon factors how do they affect their mutation rates I would imagine that's a difficult thing to Define because your body has all these really good repair mechanisms so they I want to say they're constantly looking for faults in the DNA and correcting them they're obviously not looking for things they're not sentient it all it's all just biochemistry so it's just a chemical doing what chemicals do but it does make
it difficult to predict you can't really say well you've been exposed to this much radiation on this time frame therefore these changes will happen because it depends on your biochemistry and the genes that you already have I think does that sound right to you Emma yeah it really does and I also think like um environmental factors in general can really change the way that our DNA behaves and which things get expressed you read a lot sometimes about um the effects of stress or if you're really
tired um and there's some people kind of um have said that these environmental pressures on your DNA change what kind of proteins are expressed or not expressed so could be why you maybe feel I don't know more sad if you're more tired or I don't know what the link is I don't think it's a direct oneto one um thing that's happening but um there's definitely a lot of evidence that different environmental pressures can change the way that you kind of adapt to the environment I think so um yeah it
does it does kind of make sense in what I think I know in my DNA Theory anyway I don't have any specific examples of this but I do remember reading that if one gene is Switched Off or not being expressed sometimes a different Gene can turn on and do a similar job or it it can lead to a different route to having the same effect I really wish I had a nice neat example to explain that because it sounds really hand waving my point is it still makes it difficult to determine if you're
mutating to eventually have a particular effect it's difficult to judge what that effect would be if we're going back this idea of could we become superheroes which is very disappointing I think so like obviously most mutations like we they're not noticeable but in terms of like accumulation like how long would a mutation need to accumulate to just like have an effect or to be noticeable good question I guess just because one cell ends up with a mutation doesn't mean
that all of your cells do but then does that mean that all of your cells have a certain number of your cells have to develop the same mutation and How likely is that yeah that's a great great point it's not a question we can answer I don't think I'm not sure anyone could ask a biochemist maybe frustrating right biochemistry is complicated this is what I've learned so far that's at least some of the detail about how mutations can occur which is either because our own biology when um
cells are dividing is introduced an error or it's because of external factors like radiation or other substances that can cause mutations uh I feel like maybe we should zoom out a bit and look at the bigger picture I think that's a point about the bigger picture because I feel like for me I'm very much looking at the cells or the images I've seen and the effects I've seen have been very much on the cellular basis or even just like literally in the DNA um and so
I kind of am really intrigued to what you guys might know about the how Evolution how we see those mutations in evolution um cuz we all know dinosaurs were a thing at one point but now now we're humans so I feel like I can't put together the pieces a little bit Yeah so I did study some paleontology in my undergraduate degree I've had a really random career um yep you have and I remember something about the DNA molecular clock which again my undergrad degree was around about the time that
the Human Genome Project was in full swings this became quite relevance what stuck in my head um and this concept is it was several decades old at the time when I was studying it uh and it's based on the idea that the majority of mutations don't really have any effect on Evolution and you get I guess what's almost like genetic creep occurring where the mutations gradually build up in a species I it's a very slow minor progression just for mutations yes so the studies seem to show that DNA
evolves at a constant rate and that rate depends on the species that you're looking at certain genes in Birds evolved in average rate of around 1% every million years so yeah really slow in human terms anyway not in geological terms which is what paleontologists are interested in as far as geologists and paleontologists concerned that's really fast it does make you think about you know um is it things like sharks or some kind of sea creatures who have been the
same since almost the dawn of time that their genetic mutation rate just must be quite low because they kind of been very similar or they just they're just like I don't know first try their genes were perfect and they were like oh these mutations are not helping us we're just going to stay as we are yeah or it might also just be that their environment they were living in there wasn't the need to like evolve cuz like that what's it called there's a type of moth that
evolved during the Industrial Revolution so originally it's supposed to be white but because of all the s from all the um factories that were burning coal to blend in and camouflage it had to like become darker so I think it ended up being black so that it could like just blend it in camouflage yeah I remember reading about that in school that there were already some that were black but they were in a minority but then became advantage to be dark colored so they became the um the
more dominant form and yeah I guess yeah I guess maybe sharks they they filled an evolutionary Niche quite quickly because they're apex predators I think apex predator for millions and millions of years into our shark episode so it could be just that they undergoing genetic creep if you like but there's no external factor that means it's suddenly beneficial to have a change in some externally obvious thing like having sharper teeth or more fins or something why you would want those things that's
just weird there was an episode that we did with Ellie it's a shame Ellie isn't here because I think his theology background would be useful but it was about the prean explosion which is when suddenly lots of life forms seem to appear and again I say suddenly in geological time which is still like thousands and millions of years there was external changes that led to different species happening so it seems like it's more external factors that lead to Evolution
rather than just random genetic quirks sometimes humans and we put on that environmental pressure and I saw like I don't know if it's I hope it's real but like the pictures of fruits like before humans got involved and then after and like an avocado had like a massive pit and it went to be really tiny because we've like the vegetables and the fruits to be the way that we want them to be so I guess we don't have anyone forcing a selection pressure on us but we have forced it
amongst loads of different fruits and beds same with orange carrots carrots weren't originally orange I did not know that why did we want them to be orange is it's just a totally weird side point so they were selectively bred by Dutch farmers who wanted to cultivate carrots that would just orange as tribute to the house of orange who were the ruling family at the time oh so for no good reason than because they could yeah basically well there you go yeah I didn't actually know that about
the carrots and I guess that's what happens when a mutation is successful and how it actually carries through um because I feel like we've talked about some mutations that don't actually have an effect but a lot of the times when mutations do have an effect um the cell actually just kind of switches off and stops the rest of the cell division so you can't carry on that mutation and um these are kind of called cell division checkpoints where in this massive long
cycle with the fancy names um different proteins are involved in basically checking things happened correctly and if they don't happen correctly the whole process stops so I feel like we probably filter out a lot of the negative mutations with these checkpoints um and maybe carrots don't have much of a sophisticated mechanism as we do that kind of links back to what I was saying about cells having really good repair mechanisms like when a cell is functioning normally it has proteins
that look for damage so even when it's not dividing it's still got these proteins that are randomly making stuff happen I don't want to use the word they're looking for things cuz they're not they don't have eyes but there are different types of damage that they can help the cell to repair um and some of them is just like a small change to one of the bases like maybe a bond gets broken a chemical bond or a methal group so something that looks like methane gets attached it and that can simply be
reversed or you get damage to entire sections of the DNA that can be replaced and even if both strands of the DNA double helix get broken they can be repaired in what sounds like a very complicated series of chemical processes involving lots of proteins and enzymes to merge the two strands back together which I'm very reassured by as a radiation scientist knowing that my DNA can repair itself how long does it take for DNA to repair itself good question I shall try to answer it based on what
I've learned from my colleagues because I think some Studies have reported that some repairs can take less than a second sort of simpler ones where it's just removing that methy group or repairing a bond I think is what they were saying others can take even longer possibly even hours to repair there's a suggestion that these more complex repairs can be slow because they involve making genes expressed that weren't previously being expressed so the gene has to be sort of I guess woken up is
one way of looking at it so it can then code for a protein or some of the biomolecule that can come in to help with the repair in some studies I said these things don't have eyes they're not looking for something so some studies seem to suggest that the DNA just randomly bumps into these repair molecules so things like the concentrations of these molecules would affect the repair times so the short answer to that is some take seconds some takes hours the long answer is well it depends on a
whole bunch of factors nice whenever I think of um DNA and even in this conversation I do just think like it's so impressive as like a molecule and how our body kind of responds and does all of these things and it knows exactly what to do and nothing really goes wrong and it's just like a really well oiled machine I just think I don't know it always makes me really interested in biology and DNA whenever I talk about it yeah I mean I guess sometimes things do go wrong but as you say given all the
chemistry that's happening in your body at any one time time it sounds like more often than not things go right yeah and I think they can repair mismatch things that happen and just I think they just kind of go with the flow and just they're there to fix it when when they can which also kind of puts a bit of a dent in Jasmine's we all going to become mutants at some point that have superpowers so we're not going to come mutants not once with superpowers we are
all mutating okay cool but having said that when we were talking before about changes in the environment I did wonder if something you know like climate change and all these other scary sounding things are happening could that then lead us to mutate in some way or we would have mutations that would somehow be beneficial to these extreme environments something I just thought of um with like mutations being beneficial to the environments there's a few people
that have it but also like llamas have a really strong oxygen binding Affinity curve which basically means at low oxygen concentrations their body can absorb more oxygen and essentially it behaves as if they're in a rich oxygen rich environment and because like llamas can stay in like high altitudes it's actually really beneficial and actually a lot of people who live in areas which are like surrounding really big mountains so a lot of the Napoles people have really incredible Like Oxygen
binding Affinity curves when they've been measured by scientists and um they're just like living in this environment and not experiencing these altitude sicknesses or oxygen deficiencies because their body is just made for it which I think is really impressive ah so does that mean if they go down to somewhere that's lower altitude they're suddenly like almost like having superhuman powers like marathon runners they can run forever and not get tired that's a good point
because that's what altitude training's about isn't it yeah they could just easily go down to a country which is way almost just above sea level and they would feel oxygen rich so what we're saying to answer Jasmine's question is get yourself to an extreme environment and wait for some sort of mutations in your DNA that are already there to become beneficial take Generations so yeah maybe not if it's already there and it just needs to be switched on I don't know who knows
what's lurking in that DNA that's Switched Off you hear things like it's helpful for a gene pool to be very diverse don't you that if there is a change in the environment then although some individuals won't bear particularly well because of that change others because of got the diversity will kind of come to the for pretty much what you were saying about those pepper moths uh so I guess ultimately any unhelpful mutation would mean that you wouldn't survive but then other mutations could
give you an advantage especially if there is a sudden change in your environment I'm thinking of things from the animal world like giraffes that have long necks they can reach food other animals can't they developed that to fill a particular Niche I would assume there are some more subtle changes if you looked at the biochemistry yeah and I think a great point of coming back to maybe we're all mutants and I wonder if anyone actually has this or has friends who have this cuz I definitely have
friends who have it but it's the coriander soap Gene that's me it's a mutation in a gene that basically means you have a chem chemical sensitivity to one of the chemicals in coriander so there is science backing up to why people can feel that coriander tastes like soap if you do have that Gene then you are definitely a mutant but I would also argue that we're all mutants because we're all different we're all mutated in a different way I have no idea what that thing is by the way to me
coriander is just coriander it doesn't taste like soap I obviously don't have that Jean it tastes like soap doesn't taste good then again for quite a long time I hated the taste of celery to the point that I would actually spit it out of my mouth I'm I'm not too sure if there was a gene that says celery taste revolting but I don't mind it so much now your tastes change as you grow whether that genan is turned off or not I don't know if that's related or if it's something else what
causes genes to be like turned on or off and like why do they do this it's hard to tell but I think um I would say you can have majority of it just being kind of external factors and like the environment can really especially when you're like growing up and I think you're like you have a faster rate of cell division I think the environmental factors can really just affect so many different things um and also there are like other proteins in your DNA that actually cause them to turn off and turn
off so I feel like there's just so many factors that it's so hard to pin down what is actually causing specific things to turn on or turn off some of it is to do with receptors on the surface of cells isn't it I know that some cells um have like epithelial growth factor receptors on them so it's a hormone the growth factor I think and that hormone binds to the receptor on the cell and the cell's like all right I'm going to start growing then I was also I read a
study um about something called the gene Notch uh in esophagal cancer and it doesn't seem to affect whether you will or will not get cancer but it does help the cancer to grow so something else makes you get aagal cancer some cinogen or something maybe or some other mutation that's happened randomly for whatever reason and because it's already got this Notch Gene it then can help it proliferate it's interesting to me how much genetic research goes into understanding how to understand what
happens in cancer the stats according to cancer UK are one and every two people will get cancer at some stage in their life so not good odds I wonder if they are all caused by mutation or iftime something in the cell just happened it was already there and it's just been switched off until that point there are like genes that do make you more susceptible to certain types of cancers cuz there was the one that was identified for breast cancer the braa one and two
mutations yes yeah so that's basically where these genes code for a molecule that will seek out cells before they become cancerous but in some people it's mutated so that Gene doesn't function as well somewhat reassuringly though just because you have that mutation doesn't mean you definitely will get cancer because there are more factors involved no same like there's also a gene that makes you more susceptible to developing Alzheimer's but it doesn't guarantee
you'll actually will develop Alzheimer's biology is complicated y I think having dwell a little bit on mutations that aren't necessarily all that helpful there must be some that are probably quite beneficial ones that you would want like super human strength you may want that I can't say I'm not interested in superhuman strength you can move a lot of heavy stuff you can make machines do that though no but you can be at the airport and not be like struggling to
carry your massive check-in bag also not a situation I've been in but I can understand how that would be frustrating I don't carry a lot of stuff when I travel U really useful when you're moving furniture also not struggled with that maybe I'm already superum strong maybe you are um so apart from superpowers there is maybe a few jeans that we might want there's a jean that's I don't even know how they identify the genes but like it's actually crazy there's a gene that's called
slc30 A8 and apparently people that have that Gene are 65% less likely to get diabetes and in what way and how you're less likely I'm not actually sure but um it's a positive for the fact that you may have some jeans that are very beneficial to you that you might not know of that means you could eat as much sugar as you wanted and have a really unhealthy lifestyle and not get that particular disease yeah for sure another one that I would want and this is only because I am lactose intolerant but
apparently there's a mutation that means that you are not lactose intolerant so you can eat as much Dairy as you want and not have your guts feel like they're about to explode so that would be nice when you were talking about superpowers before I said I didn't want superhuman strength but when I thought about it as you guys have been talking I would quite like the ability to be kind of like Ant-Man I know Ant-Man didn't have a mutation it was a suit and the pin particle that made him go really
small but imagine if like you could just make part of your body turn into like a you and then send it somewhere wouldn't that be really useful if you knew what it was doing and you could see small things happening somewhere else like you've lost your car keys and you need to go and look for them you can send 10 mini 's off to go and search so your superpower would be the ability to clone yourself as well as to change the size of your body yeah to make a tiny clone
yeah which I assume is biologically impossible because you couldn't replicate everything a human body does on that small size it has all those cells for a reason well I think and man logic was just that the space between the atoms was smaller it was which I also think is physically impossible yeah atoms are that size for a reason molecules are that size for a reason what about you Emma what superpow would you want you know I have been thinking about it when you were saying that and
I've always wanted to be able to fly but I wouldn't want the flying to feel like running which I feel like it would do like I feel like it would be a workout yeah that's always been my my number one choice if if I could choose I think I always feel like flying is going to be really uncomfortable just because you'd have all the wind like whipping past you and then your eyes would get really dry and other stuff you would like to think if you mutated to be able to fly so if
you just had wings you would also mutate in a way that would make your body resistant to whatever's going on when you're flying yeah or I just wear some goggles you know some Aviation goggles be fine and a helmet maybe yeah I quite like the idea of flying as well I still like the idea of being really tiny I feel like that has more uses I like the idea of talking to my rats as well and playing with them a bit more than being a giant human so if I can be rat sized and then go scare
people and I am just rambling now so I'm going to leave it there uh I think we're saying that it's highly unlikely given how biology and genetic drift or gene mutations work that we would develop superpowers and there are probably some slightly more sensible superpowers Beyond being tiny and being able to fly that may happen in the future as a result of environmental changes but then again humans are quite good at insulating themselves from environmental changes in some way so maybe not sadly I
think I'm saying Jasmin we're not going to become superpowered mutants boo but maybe if someone wants to genetically engineer something which is a very different episode I think maybe then that would be a basically Deadpool he's a mutant yeah oh Wolverine he was also genetically altered did he not already have a mutation I know he was altered his his skeleton was more yeah mutation is regeneration but the actual like Co thing was genetically modified in him he can't be Wolverine without the
actual genetically modified beit he'd just be guy who regenerates was it the claws that were the genetically modified beit which then yeah right because the adamantium was chemically attached to him by Engineers yep if anyone has no clue what we're talking about go watch some X-Men go watch the latest Deadpool movie right so I guess we'll leave it there we'll see see you all next time for another probably just as weird and strange science-based conversation the views expressed in this
podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]