💾 Archived View for lyrics.locrian.zone › ACapellaScience › CRISPRCas9.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:44:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

CRISPR-Cas9 (Bring Me a Gene) — A Capella Science

Based on “Mr Sandman” by Pat Ballard

CRISPR-Cas9

Bring me a gene

Encoding for a specific protein

Make a few snips at this coded locus

You work so well inside a streptococcus

Cas9

I’m so alone

Without your scissors in my chromosome

Cut me up and do it clean

CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9

Keep me a gene

A viral sequence you’ve already seen

Chopped into bits and stored as genomic

With clustered repeats

That are palindromic

Cas9

Bind with this code

Use it to target infections of old

Immunized like a vaccine

CRISPR-Cas9 keep me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9

Cut me a gene

With a precision that I’ve never seen

Unzip a strand and interrogate it

Seek out your sequence until you locate it

Cas9

Lock into place

And do your job as endonuclease

Chop just like a guillotine

CRISPR-Cas9 cut me a gene

Snip snap!

CRISPR-Cas9

Bring me a gene

By commandeering my repair routine

A strand to match your severed location

For some homologous recombination

Cas9

Cheap and precise

Rewriting genomes from microbes to mice

And soon the humble human being

CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9

Give us a gene

Give us a miracle like that one Nazarene

‘Cause giving the lame their legs and the blind their sight is

In view for dystrophy and retinitis

But CRISPR-Cas9

What if you fall

Outside our power and inside us all

That really could incite a scene

When this terrible wonderful power unsettling

Opens the door to unethically meddle

Is ev’ry congenital malady bettered

Sufficient to warrant genetics unfettered

To modify man in the manner of Gattaca

Raise up a mammoth or make a Rattata

Dramatical medical means to eradicate aging

Or cancer or make a fanatic

A mass epidemic a weapon nefarious

Single mosquito to wipe out malaria

Send in a viral infection to ferry a

Cure to the cells of an HIV carrier

Freed of disease as we’re free to uncover

What nature and accident failed to discover

And free to be other than

All that we ever have been

CRISPR-Cas9

Oh CRISPR-Cas9

Bring us a gene

You wondrous ribonucleoprotein

You have the power to vanquish or save us

Who would have thought that the microbe that gave us

Cas9

S. pyogenes

The source of strep and flesh-eating disease

Housed this marvellous machine

Full of uses great and obscene

CRISPR-Cas9 bring us

Please don’t sting us

Cas9 bring us a gene

With adenine

And thiamine

Incite a scene

Cas9 bring us a gene