Gene Drives: Wormholes of BiologyJanuary 8, 2016Gene drives have been hitting the news quite a bit lately, generating a lot of hype, hope, and some hand-wringing. They are a relatively new concept, so it’s well worth a quick road trip into gene drive history, domestication, safety, and practical challenges. Gene Drives? In essence, gene drives are the wormholes of biology. They look […]
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 […]