The following article is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator,
McMaster University’s partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.

Lecture: Unlocking the mysteries of life, one gene at a time

Steve Buist
The Hamilton Spectator
(Nov 12, 2007)

David Andrews and his team of McMaster University scientists plan to be at the forefront when it comes to writing the instruction manual for the 30,000 genes that are contained in human DNA.

And they'll be doing it in painstaking fashion, one gene at a time.

Scientists around the world have spent the past 20 years mapping out the precise locations for each of the genes found in the long twisting strands of DNA inside the nucleus of each cell.

But that's only part of the equation. The bigger challenge is figuring out what function each one of these genes performs when it's switched on.

Andrews will be explaining how the McMaster team plans to conquer that challenge during a free lecture titled "From yeast to human stem cells -- learning about life one gene at a time," which he'll give tomorrow night in The Spectator auditorium.

The talk is part of the Science in the City lecture series, sponsored jointly by McMaster University and The Spec.

So far, Andrews has been perfecting the necessary techniques by using yeast cells, which contain 6,000 genes, but in a few months, the group will be ready to start working with human embryonic stem cells.

A stem cell is like a tiny blank canvas that the body can use to turn into the various, highly specialized cells that make up different tissues and organs.

The more differentiated a cell becomes, the more genes get switched off. Embryonic stem cells, however, still have most of their 30,000 genes switched on.

Andrews likens his quest to the board game Battleship, with each square on the board representing one of the genes in the embryonic stem cell.

They'll call out a number and see if there's a hit by monitoring what happens inside the cell, thanks to some sophisticated machinery at Mac that's found nowhere else in North America.

"When you get a hit, that also tells you where else to shoot," said Andrews, a professor in McMaster's department of biochemistry and biomedical sciences. He's also the Canada Research Chair in Membrane Biogenesis.

"This is going to be the most comprehensive attempt at figuring out what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and what makes it go in any one particular direction, that's ever been tried on this earth," he added.

The task is a little like walking into a house that has 30,000 wall switches and then flicking them off one a time to see what happens in the house.

Sometimes, it might seem like nothing at all happens. Other times, it might be easy to figure out what the switch controls because a light will turn off or the ceiling fan stops.

Take cows, for instance.

Cows that are missing one very specific gene develop two sets of each skeletal muscle in their bodies. The cow is normal in other respects, except it has twice as many muscles.

"This cow is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of cows," said Andrews. "Every skeletal muscle is duplicated."

Once the instruction manual is put together, the long-term goal is to put the knowledge to use in regenerative medicine.

But early attempts to use stem cells with Parkinson's patients, for example, show that while there have been some promising signs, there are still bugs that need to be worked out.

"We don't know enough about how to engineer stem cells to actually be able to use them for regenerative medicine yet," said Andrews. "We need to learn a lot more before we're going to be able to put them into people."

The lecture is free and open to the public. To register, call 905-525-9140, ext. 24934, or send an e-mail to sciencecity@mcmaster.ca. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the talk begins at 7 p.m.

sbuist@thespec.com

905-526-3226