None Shall Pass! Genome Editing Stops Heritable Diseases in Their TracksMay 4, 2015The scientific world is still reeling from the news of the first genome editing of human embryos to treat genetic disease, as we have reported previously here on Epigenie. Unfortunately, the paper suggested that this strategy may need huge improvement or may never be applicable. However, another recently published study, from the laboratory of Juan Carlos […]
Spray Your Way Free of Cystic Fibrosis with a Gene Editing Nasal SprayMay 1, 2015With allergy season around the corner, you might be turning to nasal sprays to relieve the symptoms. But now Marie Egan’s lab at Yale University have developed a very different type of nasal spray that helps overcome a disorder much more devastating: Cystic Fibrosis. Earlier attempts to correct the F508del CFTR mutation have been undertaken using CRISPRs in […]
Catching RNA Polymerases in Action: New NETs for Higher ResolutionMay 1, 2015For a long time RNA polymerases did not get the credit they actually deserve. They have been viewed as muscle-cars at a drag race: Waiting for a start signal to race along the gene only stopping for the finish line. This view, however, has markedly changed with the development of high-throughput sequencing techniques such as […]
Cas9 Gets an Illuminating Upgrade: Light-activatable Genome EditingApril 30, 2015While dead Cas9 (dCas9) has been coupled to optogenetic systems to enable on the fly effector domain action, the not so dead Cas9 has just gotten a very different form of light induction that works with genome editing. The designer genome editing system, developed by a talented team from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, […]
Get in the Loop of Antisense Mediated Transcriptional RegulationApril 30, 2015Long non-coding RNA research isn’t just a load of HOTAIR; since their initial discovery long non-coding RNAs have revealed their importance in regulating the genome. One such insight is the observation that lncRNA express antisense transcripts, which are abundantly found either partially or completely overlapping with transcripts from the opposite strand. These have been shown […]
