Category Archives: back to basics

A decade of CRISPR is only the beginning

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CRISPR past, present, and future according to the review by Jennifer Doudna and Joy Y. Wang just published in Science. This is the original caption: “The past decade of CRISPR technology has focused on building the platforms for generating gene knockouts, creating knockout mice and other animal models, genetic screening, and multiplexed editing. CRISPR’s applications in medicine and agriculture are already beginning and will serve as the focus for the next decade as society’s demands drive further innovation in CRISPR technology.”

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Four tips on epigenetic editing

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Credit IGI

The epigenetic way to editing is hot these days. Here are our suggested readings to keep pace:
1) the basics of the tools CRISPRoff and CRISPRon are explained on the website of the Innovative Genomics Institute
2) Nature Biotechnology news on Chroma Medicine, a company pioneering epigenetic editors
3) The Scientist on resetting the DNA of rats to reverse alcohol damage (see also the paper by Bohnsack et al. in Science Advances)
4) the review discussing translational issues in epigenetic editing published by Huerne et al. in The CRISPR Journal.

Three August news not to be missed

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by Philippa Steinberg

The Innovative Genomics Institute presents CRISPR Made Simple – the new online primer on gene editing made for kids or anyone starting from scratch.

The Broad Institute unveils SEND, a new delivery system inspired to retrotransposons (see Feng Zhang’s paper in Science)

Genotoxicity concerns: Nature Biotechnology explains how a cancer-associated phenomenon called chromothripsis could affect CRISPR therapies.

TALEN vs CRISPR

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Soon after the arrival of CRISPR, a report from Harvard compared the new gene-editing technique and its older sister side by side. As reported by Kevin Davies in the book “Editing Humanity,” CRISPR won convincingly, and this paper helped boost CRISPR’s popularity. This video shows that nowadays CRISPR is considered the best in terms of ease of design, ease of experimental setup, and flexibility. TALEN, however, is more precise. What about efficiency? Well, it depends. CRISPR works better in the less-tightly wound regions of the genome, but according to a recent Nature Communications paper, TALEN can access the heterochromatin region better than CRISPR. The study by Huimin Zhao and colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign adds to the evidence that the more (tools), the better.