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The Early Days of CRISPR with Dr. Blake Weidenheft

December 28, 2015

Interview 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 […]

Directed Evolution in Synthetic Biology with Dr. Andrew Ellington

December 12, 2015

Interview with Dr. Andrew Ellington at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways Parts, Circuits, and Systems So in directed evolution, what you’re generally trying to do is to optimize function. And that can mean a lot of different things. But if we keep within the synthetic biology paradigm, we […]

CRISPR-Enhanced Enhancer Mapping

November 29, 2015

Enhancers are hugely important regulatory regions of DNA that control gene expression. New techniques are telling us a lot about enhancer structure and function, but the study of enhancers could still use some enhancement. Enhancers are currently defined by what they look like (local DNA methylation, histone modifications, and chromatin availability) or by pulling them […]

CRISPR Takes the PERV Out of Pig Organs

November 13, 2015

Nobody likes a PERV – they just make everyone uncomfortable. Porcine (pig) Endogenous RetroViruses (PERVs) are a creepy concern when it comes xenotransplantation (transplanting organs from a different species), since the perks of not having to wait for an organ transplant take a hit when PERVs get all up in your genome. In order to […]

New Cas Effectors Inject Fresh Talent Onto CRISPR Stage

November 12, 2015

Poor Cas9. If CRISPR were a new music trend, Cas9 would the band that was playing CRISPR long before it was cool, rode the CRISPR wave to stardom, alienated its fans with copyright battles, and is already under threat from the new kids. Less metaphorically, Cas9 is an enzyme that uses RNA spacers (crRNAs) transcribed […]

CRISPR-Cas6 Translational Activators

October 30, 2015

The CRISPR-Cas system, while originally hailing from the Domain of Bacteria, has made the biggest splashes by traveling abroad into the Kingdoms of Plantae and Animalia. There it has found great fame and fortune mostly as a tool for genome editing. Scientists back in the Bacterial Domain didn’t need CRISPR as much for gene editing, […]

CRISPR as an Anti-Viral for Plants

October 30, 2015

Home cooks know well that putting vegetables in the crisper can keep them healthy; new work shows that putting CRISPR in the vegetables works as well. Every year, plant viruses destroy tens of billions of dollars worth of crops around the world. Even worse, localized crop failures can cause food shortages and destroy family farmers. […]

Validating GWAS with Epigenome Editing

October 10, 2015

GWASs (genome-wide association studies) have found a lot of genetic variants associated with various traits and diseases. But GWASs suffer from that old weakness, the mantra of every good scientist: correlation does not imply causation. The problem gets even worse when you find out most GWAS variants are in non-coding regions of DNA, meaning they […]

Gene Circuits that Sense and Respond to DNA

October 6, 2015

Synthetic biology has gone through a sequence-specific revolution recently, with CRISPR-cas leading the charge of systems that can detect any DNA sequence of interest. But these techniques have a key limitation: they can only respond locally with one action – cutting, activating, or repressing – at that particular DNA molecule. This is like giving Paul […]

RNA-Based, DNA Free Circuits For Gene Therapy

October 1, 2015

Gene therapy, for all its recent progress, seems a bit stuck on the idea of introducing, well, genes, meaning DNA sequences. But what about that other nucleic acid, RNA? RNA potentially has several advantages over DNA, including a much lower risk of genome integration and lower immunogenicity. In fact, we recently saw a transcription-free CRISPR-cas9 […]

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