Around the world, athletic organizations have experienced an arms race in the evolution of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Each year different biological pathways are exploited using advance scientific research, and regulatory agencies respond with their own form of forensic analysis in a cat and mouse approach. Steroids, precursor’s and a host of other biologically significant compounds have been the focus in the modern age of PED development. However, the game has changed since the advent of CRISPR Cas-9 technology. Using the CRISPR, think of it as a genetic scissor and glue stick, genes can be added or removed with increased precision. This form of genetic enhancement in athletics is known as ‘gene doping’.
Scientists and athletic commissions have both tried to raise concerns regarding the obvious issues with genetic enhancement. One of the major problems is the lack of detection capabilities existing to detect such nefarious methods. Recently, researcher Mario Thevis, and colleagues, investigated whether a gene doped protein could be identified from the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes (SpCas9), in human plasma samples and in mouse models.
Samples were analyzed with mass spectrometry and found that they could successfully identify unique components of the SpCas9 protein from the complex plasma matrix. The scientists are off to a promising start in the initial steps of gene doping diagnostics but much work still needs to be done.