While 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
CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing of Human Embryos: A Look at the Science
Unless 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 HIV
All 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 Acetylation
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
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 […]