How does one become a genetic engineer?

>get some bacteria
>get some phages
>get bacteria infected
>introduce new bacteria
>test to see if the new bacteria required plasmids
congrats, you did genetic engineering.

>I want to meddle with the forces of life, fix aging, create unholy biological monstrosities and become a divine creative force

Prepare to be really fucking underwhelmed.

The lab I worked in a few years back takes skin biopsies from patients with neurodevelopmental disorders and reprograms the fibroblast cells back into stem cells, then into neurons for use in drug screens to try and find treatments for whatever genetic disorder the original donor has. Sometimes we would use CRISPR to correct the original mutation and use those corrected cells as isogenic controls in our experiments.

It sounds really sci-fi and cool to people outside of the field but in reality its just like 3 months of changing some pink liquid in a plastic dish every other day and hoping your experiment doesn't die two months into the protocol because fucking EVERYTHING kills them.

Mammalian biological systems are enormously complex, the last RNA sequencing experiments we did looking at healthy cells versus disease-derived cells identified more than 40,000 different genes that were expressed differently between the two. There are teams of computational biologists and bioinformatics people who's jobs it is to sort though the massive amount of data that gets generated from those kinds of experiments and try to make some kind of sense out of it.

My poing being that most of the ideas regular people have about genetic engineering are memes. If your idea of creating "unholy biological monstrosities" is deleting some genes in mouse embryos and fucking them up to the point where they're so unhealthy they just die shortly after birth (if they even make it that far) then sure there's lots of that being done, but that's probably not what you had in mind.

t. disgruntled geneticist

Are there new approaches to fighting aging that at are at least novel? Like real-time DNA replacements in mutated cells using some dope instruments or nano-technology.

hijacking with a similar question

I'm sorry, that still sounds fucking awesome.

shortening of telomeric DNA at the ends of chromosomes over repeated cell divisions is associated with cell aging. There's an enzyme called telomerase which lengthens the telomeres and reverses this process, but the telomerase gene is typically only switched on in embryonic stem cells and germline cells. i.e. most of the cells in your body don't express this enzyme and thus experience telomere shortening and aging.

I believe there's been some research into re-activating telomerease in adult tissue as a way of reversing aging, but it's messy as a therapeutic strategy because reactivation of telomerase is a hallmark of a lot of cancers.

Apparently lobsters express telomerase in all of their cells throughout their lives and that's why they live so long.

nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7328/full/nature09603.html

nature.com/news/2010/101128/full/news.2010.635.html

>I'm sorry, that still sounds fucking awesome.

it is and it isn't. At the end of the day when you finally get all your data it's really exciting, but the actual day to day lab work can be really repetitive, monotonous and boring. There's also nothing more frustrating than waiting 4 weeks for cells to differentiate so that you can do an experiment only to have something fuck up right at the end and have all that time wasted.

Academia is a slog. The long hours and horrendously low pay can make anyone bitter. All the stem cell reprogramming and neurological disease modeling that my friends and family members outside of science would always tell me was "so incredible and inspiring" was netting me a whopping $20,000 per year to live off of, while paying $12,000 a year in rent. High school dropouts who can barely manage to work a cash register at McDonalds bring home more money than PhD students and its pretty much impossible to not let it get to you.

If you're just mixing stuff why can't it be automated? aren't liquid handling robots pretty easy? is it just that grad students are cheaper?

>research has the potential to provide revolutionary life-saving medicine for genetic diseases from tested patients
>20k a year
wtf

>is it just that grad students are cheaper?

Pretty much exactly this. Our research center had a core facility with a bunch of fancy robotic equipment for doing automated high throughput screens. I can't remember exactly what the hourly fee was for using the facility but it was certainly more than my "hourly" wage. Some of the really big labs with boatloads of funding would often use the facility but we never did.

What really got me was when one of my friends from high school landed a job as a social media coordinator. They did an undergrad in communication studies and currently get paid $50k+ a year to manage a twitter account.

>What really got me was when one of my friends from high school landed a job as a social media coordinator. They did an undergrad in communication studies and currently get paid $50k+ a year to manage a twitter account.

>tfw everyone was right about STEM and wanted me to study finance and I knew it all along but I love science so much

So the lesson is basically that you should get as much programming/bioinformatics experience as possible to avoid being a lab-cuck.
Thank god I'll my undergrand thesis will be all computational ;).

the STEM meme is real

>So the lesson is basically that you should get as much programming/bioinformatics experience as possible to avoid being a lab-cuck
This is honestly the way to go right now. A lot of labs are dying for people with computational and bioinformatics backgrounds because they're generating so much data they don't know how to even begin to analyze it. Plus you'll develop skills that are useful and in-demand in a lot of different areas, instead of developing some hyper-specialized lab skills that are literally useless outside of your niche area of research.

You get paid the same as a wetlab-cuck while you're in grad school but once you're out you make way more. Computaional/bioinformatics post docs can command upwards of $100k a year depending on your background, and if you find out you hate research after grad school you can always fuck off and go work in finance or tech industries instead.

To do what you want to do, you need a insane grasp of a large amount of subjects. Modelling and machine learning to see which genes to change. Statistics for the machine learning. Informational system design as-well as a godlike automatic lab. These are already being made so you are more likely to hack those places than manage to master all these subjects, put them to use, and afford all of it

study biochemistry

this and

>much programming/bioinformatics experience as possible

well yo-

>I want to meddle with the forces of life, fix aging, create unholy biological monstrosities and become a divine creative force.

on second thought nevermind

this thread is pretty much my uni career so far
fell for the genetic engineering meme, realised I wanted out of pipette hell, now bioinformatics postgrad

This is why my major will be bioinformatics, even though I love lab work I'd rather have both equally.

>realised I wanted out of pipette hell
Lol. I mean I guess it might be cool if you are working with like human cells or transgenic plants/animals, but when you're just pipetting e. coli lysates...
>implying you'll get anywhere near a lab with a bioinformatics degree

I think the best way to get both would be to take a mol bio/biochem education and then fill up electives with programming/bioinformatics/math.

Threads like this make me consider specializing in bioinformatics further in my last year. Lab research seems to be idealised a lot, and I definitely fell for the mol bio meme, I visited some postgrads' labs and their day-today work seems inordinately dull and repetitive. I couldn't imagine doing that for 4 years. The only thing that sustains them I suspect is the vision of their goal...

The theory is always very interesting, but I wish labs were automated and every hypothesis was tested using robots. But since that's not happening any time soon, I'll probably go the CS route as well, shame...

ITT I'm getting the impresion that biology is much more about information management than actual biochemistry.

engineer some dank ass weed

>you fell for the working in lab meme
I don't mind working the lab so much, but I keep wondering If I couldn't have done something computer science related and end up working in the same area anyway

Biology is a big field. But not all its sub-fields have a lot of good jobs to offer.

> I'm getting the impression that biology is much more about information management than actual biochemistry.

It's both really. A typical RNA sequencing experiment pipeline would look something like this:

>biologists do the wet lab work to generate some massive data set
>computational and bioinformatics people mine that massive amount of data to pull out what is statistically relevant. Shortens list from tens of thousands of hits to maybe a thousand or so.
>biologists take new shortened data set and interpret what hits could potentially be biologically relevant using knowledge of biological pathways and systems. Shortens list from a thousand or so hits to 10 - 100 candidate genes.
>biologists do follow up experiments (e.g. CRISPR knockouts) to validate function of candidate genes

The computational stuff is only really important in one step of the process, but it's a CRITICALLY important step.

The flip side of a lot of wet labs looking for people with computational skills is that a lot of purely computational labs are interested in taking on trainees with purely biological backgrounds because they have the knowledge to actually interpret the results that get spit out of the statistical analysis.

>get you a man who can do both

this is why i work in plants

all the fun of genetics and molecular bio without the absolute fuckery of mammalian biology and stem cell lines

although yeah I'm supplementing my grad education with lots of statistics and mathematical modeling and I want to learn some machine learning

>get you a man who can do both
Wouldn't someone with a bio background who specialized in bioinformatics do both?

For instance, you can go this route in our uni
>BSc microbio
>MSc microbio
>PhD bioinformatics

couldn't somone with that background do both the wet lab work and data mining?

I'm asking because I'm thinking of going that route

There are at least two different fields within genetics:
Computational geneticists work on computers and need to know three languages (R, C++, and Python or Perl, generally.)
Bench scientists do the biochemistry shit, though they also work with sequence info in a more focused sense, as opposed to a big picture sense.

Our uni gives us so much free time on the cluster that if you aren't doing around-the-clock computation you don't even need to know C++ to optimize your shit.

if you're thinking bubbly DNA being cut with nanoscissors and fluorescent beakers with smoking liquids in it, you're in for a surprise, it's a lot of math (nothing extraordinary) hardy-weinberg, probability, pedigree analysis, the rest is done with pipettes or simply being automated to the point that what's needed is people who know how to run a machine

this is basically what my choice for an internship was.
at the end of my degree i have to choose an internship and all i wanted was to make better species, since all of the fuckery and ethics behind animals, i decided to go for plants.
sadly i won't be able to actually do it since there's no actual work being done at the moment, so i'm stuck with micropropagation and stress testing

It's easy. Just become a gay geneticist

That's a good route to take, you can certainly do both but it's pretty much impossible to be able to do both equally well. You're always going to be lean either slightly more biologically focused or slightly more computational/math focused, depending on what route you take.

The spectrum kind of goes:
>wet lab biology - - > bioinformatics - - > computation biology/biostatistics

If you start off in CS/math and switch to more biology related stuff later you're typically still going to lean more towards the CS side of things. If you start of in biology youre still going to lean more towards the bio side.

Bioinformatics gives you a good mix of both and will allow you to do both sides of things pretty well, you just won't have the same kind of expertise as someone who specialized in one end of the spectrum or the other. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means you probably won't be doing any of the more hardcore stuff that requires either really in depth computational knowledge (machine learning and artificial neural network stuff comes to mind), or really specialized biological knowledge.

>how do I do anything hard?

step 1: turn off the internet forever

this is not a joke

Actual geneticists don't do any of that shit. They perform things like genome wide association mapping which basically tells them very vague, mostly useless information.

>all genetics so far has been a big waste of time
>the exact same and equivalent of drawing a big pussy across the sahara desert so it can be seen from space
what are you saying? are you a geneticist? somehow, i don't think you are.

I always hated plant genetics in undergrad because I thought plants were boring, kicking myself for not taking more interest in it now because it seems like one of the few fields where the dream of "playing God" is actually somewhat obtainable.

What about with Cannabis legalization coming up on the horizon? There was a plant genetics researcher position open a few months back with a big MMJ producer here in Canada, debated applying for it even though my background is in mammalian genetics. It seems like legalization will open a lot of opportunities both in research and in industry for things like sequencing strains for protecting intellectual property or developing quality control systems.

Cannabis legalization is too far in my country, i'm not from the americas, my country when it comes to genetics on plants usually works with wheat, rye and grapes at least right now these are the main focus.
Maybe in a few years i could jump on the cannabis bandwagon but i'm concerned ill lose my interest plant culture when i apply for a masters in bioinformatics.

>40,000 different genes
But there's like 20000 to 25000 genes making proteins in a cell?

The thing about plants is that the things that make them boring are also the things that make them biologically interesting.

They have a degree of developmental plasticity you don't see anywhere else in multicellular life.

Imagine if you castrated a dog and came back a month later and found it grew and extra three sets of testicle. Imagine if a toddler grew an extra four feet over its lifespan because as a kid its parents put snacks on top of the fridge instead of on the counter. That's the kind of wild shit plants get up to, but it's all kinda masked under a layer of "boooooring, they don't move at all".

Also they can be polyploid as FUCK. We had a faculty candidate a while back who was using, IIRC, a tetraploid species as a model organism for a hexaploid species.

You really are a fucking genius.