Human Pluripotent Stem Cells (hPSCs) Elevate Performance with Chimera FormationJanuary 8, 2016Ask Usain Bolt, Yelena Isinbayeva, or Lindsey Vonn and they will tell you that Gold is the only thing that matters. To them, it came in the guise of an Olympic medal (or two), but human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have been in the hunt for a slightly different type of gold to prove their […]
Moving Genome Editing into the Clinic with Dr. J Keith JoungDecember 29, 2015Interview with Dr. J Keith Joung, MD, PhD at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways Moving Genome Editing into the Clinic My laboratory is focused on genome editing technologies and, more recently, on epigenome editing technologies as well. I got into this field first through protein engineering. So I was […]
The Early Days of CRISPR with Dr. Blake WeidenheftDecember 28, 2015Interview with Dr. Blake Weidenheft at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways The Early Days of CRISPR I was one of the earlier people involved in the CRISPR– in CRISPR biology. And so we didn’t really come at this with the intent to try to develop some new genome […]
Retroviral lincRNA Regulates miRNA Pluripotency SwitchDecember 28, 2015Everyone knows the old saying that “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, but what are you supposed to do when life gives you a genome full of retroviral ncRNAs? Nature seems to think it should evolve elaborate regulatory elements for your complex development. Two-thirds of the 10,000 long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNA) found so […]
Going Direct: Reprogramming without iPSCs in Cell TherapiesDecember 21, 2015The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) represents one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of our times, bringing us to the brink of patient-specific stem cell-based therapies. The “simple” generation process involves the forced expression of transcription factor genes in differentiated cells taken from the patient (normally skin cells) to “kick-start” the pluripotency-associated […]