In fact, some people have already read the information that Qin Ran took out, and Jiang Weiguo used these materials to persuade others, such as Wang Xuezheng.

Of course, those experts and scholars who have not read the materials and belong to other disciplines do not have a clear idea of the giant mecha mentioned in the data.

When the projector began to play the video data of [War Vanguard], everyone intuitively understood what a mecha was.

As soon as the video material was broadcast, the whole conference room became noisy, with some exclamation, some whispering, and so on. Qin Ran also held a laser pointer and introduced:

"This is the mecha that I spent ten years building - [War Vanguard], 9.3 meters tall, weighing 114.9 tons, powered by a miniature rubidium ion reactor, with a maximum output of 250 horsepower, a continuous output of 1050 horsepower, and a kinetic energy conversion rate of 68%........"

Qin Ran just made a brief introduction, which took five minutes, and all the experts and professors present were there, and some of the academic terms involved were not afraid that others would not understand.

But as soon as the introduction was finished, some people jumped out to question,

"Your mecha is no more than ten meters tall, at most it is a large mecha, not a giant mecha!"

"Yes, it's just a large mecha, but a large mecha can be built, so is it still difficult to build a giant mecha?"

Another biogenetics scholar questioned: "I just made a simple calculation, if you build a giant mecha with reference to the body proportions of [War Vanguard], it is not much, it is sixty meters high, and it is estimated that the cost will be tens of billions, is it worth spending such a big price to build a mecha?" ”

"Ten billion, an astronomical amount for other institutes, but for your biological genetics, it's a piece of cake. Some time ago, didn't you spend a billion to buy a dinosaur? So I can't believe it when it comes out of your mouth. ”

Someone else asked, "Building such a large mecha not only costs a lot of money, but also consumes a lot of time." ”

Qin Ran opened his mouth and replied: "From the design to the success of the test drive, I personally estimate that it will take at least half a year." ”

"Half a year.... This cycle is too long. The giant crocodile in Chicago has grown to 60 meters in just a few days. ”

"Half a year is not a long time!" Qin Ran replied while asking, "Could it be that the academic world is only keen on speed now?" An ordinary crocodile, in just a few days from a few meters to sixty meters, this is indeed incredible, to say that it is a miracle, but nothing is perfect, there are gains and losses, the same is true of genetic medicine, although it can make the animal grow quickly, but it is also destined to make the animal lose something. ”

"For example, the three-headed beasts that appeared in Chicago, although they have huge bodies, but their temperament has also become extremely brutal, they can no longer be called animals, but more like three-headed beasts, can humans really control this kind of beast? Are you sure that the disaster that happened in Chicago won't play out somewhere else? ”

"It's only temporary!" A biology expert retorted: "As you said, nothing can be perfect, but through the means of genetic science, this imperfection can be compensated, so we have reason to believe that in the near future, human beings will develop more suitable genetic drugs." ”

"Is that really the case?" At the same time, Qin Ran asked rhetorically, holding a laser pointer and pointing to the information on the projector: "This is a clip of news materials ten years ago, when my country sent a special team to collect blood orchids in Borneo, and Professor Ma Yuan, a geneticist, said when he attended the press conference: Blood orchids contain mysterious factors, and if they are developed into medicines, they can double people's lifespan." But ten years later, the drug has not been successfully developed. ”

Speaking of this, Qin Ran sighed lightly: "The Havelik limit is not so easy to break, but once it is broken, it will be eaten by life." Gene Energy has also been countered by using clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repetition technology to break this limit. ”

Li Zhimin had regained his composure at this time, and interjected: "Do you still know the technique of clustering regular intervals and short palindrome repetitions?" ”

Although most people know about the catastrophe caused by the berserk beasts, and everyone knows about gene editing, not many people know what technology Gene Energy uses to achieve gene editing.

Qin Ran nodded, "Because I need to, I have taught myself the knowledge of biological genes." ”

"Since you have studied genetics, you should know that there are several methods of gene editing, how can you be sure that Gene Energy uses clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repetition technology to achieve gene editing?"

"Indeed, there are four types of gene editing, one of them, giant nucleases, which are known to be effective in cutting DNA, but they are usually recognized and cleaved at multiple sites with poor specificity, and giant nucleases are the most specific naturally occurring nucleases, so it is also the least efficient of the four methods, constrained by its DNA-binding elements and cleavage elements, it can only identify one potential target per 1,000 nucleotides, and the precision of this method is unpredictable. Obviously, Genomics is not going to choose this approach. ”

"Second, zinc finger nuclease, zinc finger nuclease is an artificially modified nuclease that is produced by fusing a zinc finger DNA-binding domain with a DNA cleavage domain of a nuclease. By designing the zinc finger domain, the specific DNA sequence of the gene of interest can be targeted and cleaved, which also allows the zinc finger nuclease to locate the unique target sequence within the complex genome. By utilizing endogenous DNA repair mechanisms, zinc finger nucleases can be used to precisely modify the genomes of higher organisms. ZFN is also known as zinc nuclease, although it overcomes the limitations of giant nucleases and can have one recognition site in every 140 nucleotides, but because of the interaction of DNA binding elements, ZFN is not much different from giant nucleases, and the accuracy of both methods is unpredictable. ”

"Third, transcriptional activation-like effector nucleases, or TALENs for short, are genetically engineered restriction enzymes that can cleave specific DNA sequences. TALEN is obtained by fusing one TAL effector DNA binding domain with one of the DNA cleavage domains of the nuclease. TALENs can be designed to bind to almost any desired DNA sequence, so when bound to nucleases, the DNA can be cleaved at specific locations. TALEN is more efficient than the first two methods and has the highest accuracy of all methods, but unfortunately TALEN can only be cleaved for specific DNA, so this makes it too costly. ”

"The last approach, which is clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repeats, is the prokaryotic immune system, which confers resistance to foreign genetic material such as those present in plasmids and bacteriophages, and is an adaptive immune system, and RNA carrying spacer sequences helps Cas proteins recognize and cleave foreign disease-causing DNA. CRISPR nucleases are slightly less accurate than TALEN for other RNA-directed Cas protein cleavage of exogenous RNA, but it does have the advantage that the other three methods do not have, that is, it can use its ~80nt CRISPR sgRNA to directly locate different DNA sequences, which can greatly save costs and greatly improve timeliness. So, if I were a senior executive at Gene Energy, I would definitely choose the clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repetition technique. ”

Just when Qin Ran was explaining, many biogenetics nodded secretly, they could hear that Qin Ran was not talking big, he had really taught himself biological genetics, and his attainments in biological genetics were not low, and his level was at least the same as that of a first-level senior engineer in biological genetics. Because if you try to pull ten researchers in ordinary biological genetics, I am afraid that nine of them will not be able to explain the four methods of gene editing.

But Qin Ran's explanation is not over yet.

"Compared to giant nucleases and zinc finger nucleases, CRISPR-Cas is already very accurate, but off-target effects are still the biggest side effects in gene editing......"

At this time, an expert interrupted Qin Ran:

"Jennifer Doudna one of the inventors of CRISPR-Cas9 technology has demonstrated three years ago that anti-CRISPR proteins can reduce off-target effects caused by CRISPR by a quarter, and the protein "AcrllA4" can even reduce the incidence of off-target effects by a factor of 4, without affecting the gene editing of the target site in the whole process, and "

Qin Ran grabbed the conversation unhurriedly: "Do you want to say that on March 18 last year, Joseph Bondi-Denumi's team discovered four proteins in Listeria that can block the activity of CRISPR-Cas9, including the AcrllA4 protein. On April 25, the team discovered three more of these proteins from a type of meningitis bacteria. ”

"Huh!" The expert who was interrupted was stunned, what Qin Ran said seemed to be really what he was going to say.

Wait, I feel that something is wrong, yes, you are a mechanical researcher, why do you pay attention to biological gene technology, isn't this a job grab, do you want to force us to engage in biological genes to learn machinery?

Qin Ran continued.

"The anti-CRISPR protein can reduce the off-target effect caused by CRISPR by a quarter, and the "AcrllA4" protein can even reduce the incidence of off-target effect by a factor of 4, but even so, it still does not reach the TALEN95.7% precision rate, and the off-target effect still exists. Even if this accuracy can be increased to 99% in the future, there is still a 1% chance of missing the target. Just like silicon, the laboratory can produce 99.99999999999% silicon, and there are still 1 part per billion impurities. ”

"Compared to the 1 in a billion chance, 1% is too big, so let's assume that the chance of off-target effect is 1 in a billion, which is small enough, but compared to the huge amount of DNA in the animal's body, the number obtained by multiplying the two sides is still huge."

"We can take the human body as an example and simply calculate, the human body is composed of 40-60 trillion cells, we take the median value of 50 trillion, each cell contains 3 billion base pairs, of course, this is a rough estimate, it does not exclude the special existence of red blood cells, germ cells, mitochondria, etc. In other words, the human body has about 1500 trillion base pairs, and if you want to edit that many base pairs, even if the chance of off-target effects is reduced to 1 in a billion, there will still be 150 trillion off-target effects. This number is still unimaginably large. ”

On August 30 last year, a foreign paper called "Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Cas9 editing in vivo" mentioned that CRISPS can introduce hundreds of unexpected mutations into the genome, including single nucleotide mutations and mutations in non-coding regions of the genome. ”

"So I personally think that the reason why the giant beast that appeared in Chicago showed strong aggression was related to off-target mutations."

When Qin Ran threw out his opinion, in an instant, the entire conference room was in a sensation.