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 […]
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, […]
CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing of Human Embryos: A Look at the ScienceApril 28, 2015Unless you were on Mars or in the middle of a Netflix binge, you couldn’t have missed the paper that has been hitting the headlines all over the world this week – the first example of the genetic modification of human embryos. The study led by Junjiu Huang (Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou) used CRISPR-Cas9 gene […]
CRISPR Goes Back to its Roots to Fight HIVApril 14, 2015All the cool techniques people are developing with CRISPR-Cas9 are great and all, but sometimes a repurposed natural genetic system just has to go back to its roots. If CRISPR was originally a virus defense system in bacteria, why not forget about all this genome engineering whatnot for a minute and just use it to […]
CRISPR Gets Creative with Histone AcetylationApril 9, 2015There’s been a lot of firsts in the world of genome editing happening lately, from its application in human embryonic stem cells, the identification of a smaller more versatile Cas9, to its upgrade to efficiently using homology-directed repair. Now CRISPR-Cas9 is getting its feet wet with epigenome editing thanks to the clever folks in the Gersbach lab […]
Slimmer Cas9 is Better Able to Squeeze into CellsApril 7, 2015We’ve already seen how CRISPR-Cas9 is making the headlines with its utility in human embryonic stem cell editing, but now it’s getting a makeover to make it even more attractive for use in humans. Current CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology is faced by two translational limitations. The first is targeting, where PAM sequences and sgRNA design […]
DNMT1 Loss is Lethal in Human But Not Mouse Embryonic Stem CellsApril 2, 2015Mouse models have been great to science, they’ve given insight into humans in ways simply not possible in humans. However, while there are striking similarities in the epigenetics of mice and men, there are also undoubtedly some fundamental differences. Now, a team from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard consisting of the labs of Alexander Meissner, J. Keith Joung, and John […]
Boosting CRISPR’s Editing EffectivenessMarch 31, 2015Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’ll know that CRISPR-Cas has been in the forefront of precise genome editing since its discovery in 1987 by Atsuo Nakata. However, as a technique it is not without shortcomings; while it has achieved a great deal of efficiency in the non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway, its ability to achieve […]
Cas9: The Ultimate Gene Driving MachineMarch 30, 2015Add one more to all the amazing things CRISPR can do: it is also the ultimate driving machine. Provided, of course, that you are a gene, and that your destination is any chromosome where you do not currently reside. Gene Drives Spread by Overwriting Alleles A gene drive is when a gene on one chromosome […]
