I watched the first season of Biohackers, the new Netflix tech thriller. I will try to limit spoilers as much as possible. What interests me now are the characters: what do they tell us about CRISPR perception? Are they original or stereotypical?
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Consider this scenario, depicted in Nature a few years ago. “It’s 2037, and a middle-aged person can walk into a health centre to get a vaccination against cardiovascular disease. The injection targets cells in the liver, tweaking a gene that is involved in regulating cholesterol in the blood. The simple procedure trims cholesterol levels and dramatically reduces the person’s risk of a heart attack”.
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Click the links below to discover Ddda, the exceptional enzyme that allows mitochondrial editing, and celebrate curiosity-driven research.
The Nature paper by Joseph Mougous and David Liu: “A bacterial cytidine deaminase toxin enables CRISPR-free mitochondrial base editing”
The news: “Scientists make precise gene edits to mitochondrial DNA for first time”
The news and views: “Mitochondrial genome editing gets precise”
The editorial: “Mitochondrial genome editing: another win for curiosity-driven research”
COVID-19 overshadowed CRISPR’s advancements this year. The July issue of Nature Biotechnology keeps you up with the latest news and trends in genome editing, covering clinical testing, tools, patents, and more.
CRISPeR Frenzy asked Luigi Naldini of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan for comment on three studies published in June on the preprint server bioRxiv. The experiments were carried out independently by the groups of Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute in London, Dieter Egli of Columbia University in New York City, and Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. These findings heighten safety concerns about heritable genome editing (see the news item by Heidi Ledford in Nature). Below you can read Naldini’s thoughts.
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Victoria Gray is the first US patient treated with CRISPR for a genetic disorder. Don’t miss the interview she gave to NPR almost one year after the experimental treatment.
FT (Flowering Locus T) is a small protein that helps plants know when to flower. Now it also allows geneticists to create heritable gene edits in the shoot apical meristem. The trick is a guide RNA augmented with an FT sequence that promotes cell-to-cell mobility. The result is a new approach to gain access to the germline.
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Genome editing + optogenetics = very fast CRISPR (vfCRISPR). Two revolutionary techniques meet in the paper by Yang Liu and colleagues just published in Science. The Johns Hopkins University team developed a caged RNA strategy that allows Cas9 to bind DNA but needs light at wavelengths that are not phototoxic to activate cleavage. The cut is immediate upon light exposure, offering scientists a way to study DNA repair from its start. The process is so precise that one allele of a gene can be edited at a time, allowing the generation of heterozygous mutations for studying complex genetic traits. See also the perspective by Darpan Medhi and Maria Jasin in Science.
CRISPeR FRENZY 