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Cancer Therapy Gets a Little Personal

April 14, 2015

Just like snowflakes we are all unique (at least genetically speaking), and unfortunately for modern medicine so are our cancers. This individuality in cancers, even of the same type or subtype, means that there is no single cure-all. However, researchers, like those at the from Washington University in St. Louis and The University of Oklahoma, […]

The Little Blue Pill Gets an Optogenetic Upgrade

April 13, 2015

While there’s no denying that optogenetics is one stimulating piece of biotechnology, the double entendre of optogenetics being a ‘turn on‘ has now become fact. The lab of Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich’s Department of Biosystems in Basel, Switzerland has developed a synthetic optogenetic technology that allows for the blue Viagra® pill to be skipped by a blue light that induces penile […]

CRISPR Gets Creative with Histone Acetylation

April 9, 2015

There’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 Cells

April 7, 2015

We’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 Cells

April 2, 2015

Mouse 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 Effectiveness

March 31, 2015

Unless 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 Machine

March 30, 2015

Add 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 […]

New Rising STARs of Transcriptional Activation

March 9, 2015

If you can pronounce CRISPR, you know RNA-mediated gene control has been a rising star in synthetic biology. In principle, RNA regulation allows gene circuits to have many more independent control switches than traditional protein transcription factors. CRISPR has turned out to be a great system for RNA-guided gene repression, but it hasn’t been as […]

Webinar: An Engineered Synergistic CRISPR/Cas9 Activator Complex for Genome-wide Transcriptional Control

March 4, 2015

Presenter: Silvana Konermann, Graduate Student in Dr Feng Zhang’s Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Systematic interrogation of gene function requires the ability to perturb gene expression in a robust and generalizable manner. The ease and scalability of the CRISPR-Cas9 system potentially enables systematic, genome-scale perturbation, but the magnitude of transcriptional up-regulation achieved by the first generation of Cas9 transcriptional […]

Express Yourself with Light-activatable CRISPR-Cas9

February 26, 2015

Guess what? It seems that blue light has a lot more to offer than just helping with your winter time blues. It could also be just what your transcriptional activation system needs. Synthetic biology has a lot to offer omics beyond genome editing and recent work from multiple groups is putting Cas9 in a different spotlight. CRISPR/Cas9 […]

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