I was told that gene therapy was base on injecting a genetically modified virus into a person, i was......?

Question

wondering could plant based toxins be used to in gene therapy instead of viruses?

Answer 1

Probably not. Plant-based toxins are simply chemicals that happen to be toxic to non-plant forms of life and are produced by plants.

Viruses are neat because they already include all the necessary tools to inject their own packaged genetic code (some use DNA and some, retroviruses, use RNA and special enzymes to convert it into DNA) into human cells, which then become little factories to make more of the viruses.

What we do is take out the viruses' factory code and insert our own, which modifies the host cell in some way (usually by correcting DNA defects with a modified copy, or even by adding DNA sequences).

The problem with this is that it doesn't yet work very well; French trials using this type of a method ended when 95 percent of the people being treated for a certain disorder ended up with cancer.

Answer 2

The virus is used because viruses are built to inject their genetic material into the cell. If we put a desirable gene into a virus, the virus is basically a delivery system for that gene.

A toxin would not do the same thing. A toxin is a chemical. It doesn't have DNA and it doesn't put DNA into a cell.

Think of a virus as a syringe and needle. It's designed to inject something.

Answer 3

There are three possibilities- A biologically engineered virus for a terrorist attack. A biologically engineered virus for population maintenance. A naturally occurring phenomena. We mustn't panic because of the media's hysteria, the only reason there have been so many deaths in Mexico is because of bad health care (Not meant to offend anybody) and there has only been one confirmed death caused by Swine Influenza in the United States. This could be a biologically engineered virus created by a radical terrorist group such as Al-Qaeda to attack innocent U.S. citizens, knowing that the United States borders are more protected than Mexico's, the virus could have easily been transmitted to the Mexican people and so forth. Viruses have been known to "jump" and transmit genes to one another creating somewhat of a hybrid virus. This MAY be the case with the Swine flu, being that it is a hybrid of The Avian flu, the Swine Flu, and the seasonal Human flu (sometimes there isn't some grand scheme to it all) this is what happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic but the Avian Influenza Virus jumped DIRECTLY to humans. The swine flu could have been created to maintain increasing populations in Mexico and may have accidentally been transmitted to American tourists who eventually spread the virus to the United States. The bottom line, no matter what the cause, don't worry so much about it because the majority of the deaths were caused by bad health care, not the flu itself. Hoped I was of some help. Also by the way, THE VIRUS IS NOT AIRBORNE, PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SPREADING IT THROUGH TRAVEL AND THEN DIRECT CONTACT.