Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[ZincFinger]

PS: Today's SIAL news has very powerful and good implications for KBLB:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sage-labs-creates-first-tissue-110000062.html

SIAL announces that it has achieved (using zinc fingers, of course!) the first tissue-specific conditional knockout in rats.

(if you can do it in rats, you can do it in silkworms. And with ZFs, wherever you can do a knock out, you can also do an insertion.)

One powerful application of this is to be able to up (or down) regulate a gene in a particular tissue when such regulation would cause problems if it occurred in additional tissues. This greatly extends the ability of KBLB to modify the silkworms and the silk in a planned manner.


(I wonder whether the large number of insertions made in the recent round of KBLB's ZF GMs is, in part, to utilize this new ability to regulate/add genes in specific tissues? This is EXACTLY the sort of thing you'd do, for example, to increase the level of a particular silk protein in the silk)

The "tissue specific" is a VERY big deal: when you are inserting genes from one species to another, sometimes they'll do what you want in one tissue, but cause problems in another, so the ideal is to get it expressed only in the tissue(s) you want it to be.

This ability means that some potential problems KBLB MIGHT encounter could be readily solved IF they should occur.

There are abundant tools to determine if something went wrong due to the addition of a transgene, where it did (expressed sequence tags, gene expression array chips, etc). Now any problems due to expression in the wrong tissues (one of the likeliest of potential problems when adding transgenes) can be readily solved with SIAL's zinc fingers.

There is very little question, IMHO, that KBLB will ultimately succeed, primarily due to the power of zinc fingers. (this is something very new and still not generally appreciated - KBLB might well be the first company to get it the recognition it deserves).

And, of course, the ability is not just for solving problems, but greatly adds to the range and power of what KBLB will be able to do with silkworms.