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Four

Seeley and I stood in front of a conference room full of people. Our crowd was made up of Dr. Lygand, investors, fellow researchers, and even doctors that weren't currently tending to a patient. When Dr. Lygand said the whole hospital, he wasn't kidding. It was a lot more people than expected, adding to the nerves I already had. I took a deep breath and began the presentation as we had rehearsed multiple times before.

"Hello all, and welcome, I am Dr. Bly and this is my colleague Dr. Rutledge." Seeley gave a warm smile. "As you know, genetic disorders have plagued the world since our creation as humans. We have suffered from the likes of Down Syndrome, cancer, Parkinson's, and the dastardly male pattern baldness." The crowd gave a small chuckle at my attempt to make the situation lighter.

"Some of these disorders have been cured, others still take the lives of our loved ones." The slide behind us changed and I took my cue to began my lines again. "Over the past three years Dr. Rutledge and I have been able to develop a marker that identifies the exact DNA sequence for any and all disorders. This marker is a protein that has the ability to attach itself to any DNA mutation, whether that is deletion, insertion, or anything else. The marker shows up as a blue color on the DNA sequence under a microscope. We then can identify the disease based on these mutations, and whether it is dominant or recessive, and even the likelihood that it will be passed on to their offspring. "

The slide changed again and Seeley started speaking, "The first genetic disorder we looked at is sickle cell disease, in which red blood cells take on a sickle shape and are unable to carry hemoglobin and can cause blockages in the bloodstream. Our patient has already been diagnosed with this disease. Once we applied the marker to the DNA strands, the mutations specific to sickle cell turned blue. This confirmed that our protein was indeed attaching itself to the correct base pairs. We already know that a baby has a 25% chance of getting sickle cell if both parents have it, and a 50% chance of being a carrier if only one parent has the disease. This is valued information for this patient and their spouse when thinking about their future children."

I took over the next section, "We then looked at a condition that would result in a physical abnormality. Retinis Pigmentosa, results in the breakdown of the rods and cones in the eye. This can result in gradual loss of eyesight, usually beginning with the peripheral vision. Once again we found success when our proteins attached themselves to the proper base pairs on the X chromosome of the patient. It was determined that the geneotype was dominant. All of the participant's children will also have this disorder. However, we also discovered that the protein was attaching itself to other nucleotides. At first we thought that this was an error, our marker wasn't working. But with further investigation, Dr. Seeley discovered that these mutations were indicative that our patient is also a carrier of Marfan Syndrome. Without running our test, this patient would have unknowingly passed this gene down to their children, resulting in the possibility of one of them or even future generations suffering from the disorder."

Seeley cleared his throat before beginning on our last participant, me. "Our last participant was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This serious mental health disorder," Seeley briefly glanced at me, "which can result in reckless behavior, as well as unstable moods and relationships. The marker was able to identify the specific base pair that causes BPD in the participant. It was determined that while they will exhibit symptoms of BPD, the likelihood that they will pass the gene on to their children is minimal, but still probable." We kept this portion of the presentation short in hopes that no one would ask any questions about it.

I quickly moved on to the next slide of our presentation. "With this marker, not only does it make it easy to distinguish which disorder a person has, but being able to identify the exact base pair allows us to determine the probability of passing that gene onto their children. Genetic counseling does a very similar process to what we have developed, however, they only identify what we already know. Our protein-dye has the ability to mark any abnormality. Not only does this help with predicating the probability of passing the mutations on, but it can also help identify disorders that are currently unknown in origin. Simply by taking the DNA of a person, with let's say, Parkinson's disease, we could narrow down what nucleotides are out of sequence that cause that specific disorder and thus use that to discover what is actually causing these diseases that are plaguing our world.