>>12229006Happy to hear you're interested in biology, anon. Plgo, huh? Are you in AP Bio or something? Or a freshman?
Yes, basically transformation of cells (bacterla, eukaryotes) requires a means to get the genetic material (plasmids, genes,etc) inside of the cell. There are many different ways to do this, and the ideal way will depend on the experiment or application. With some bacteria, you can do a chemical transfection where the cell wall/membrane are weakened chemically, there is electroporation, where pores are formed in the membrane by electricity, and there is the use of phages, or viruses that have evolved to attack bacteria. Viruses have small enough genomes that they can be encoded with a few plasmids, meaning that, if you get these plasmids inside of a bacterium via one of the first two methods (or others) that I mentioned, you can grow lots of basically most kinds of viruses. If these viral encoding plasmids were also bunched with a plasmid encoding Cas9 and RNA that will guide Cas9 to a target gene, and the virus is a virus that attacks mammalian cells, you can use this virus you grew to transform mammalian cells. I'm pretty sure this is how some genetic stem cell therapies are already done. IIRC, there are some corrections of white blood cell diseases that are done by removing bone marrow, infecting it with CRISPR stuff using viruses, and putting it back in the body.
These viruses are also used experimentally for numerous types of in vivo (while the animal is still alive, in the body) experiments. dCas9 upregulation or down regulation are relatively new but I'm sure there are lots of people who want to see it in the clinics soon. I adenoviral therapy was attempted but it killed a guy because of an immune reaction and stuff like that got canned for a bit.
