Category: News

Controlling genes using CRISPR shows high degree of specificity By Ken Kingery Researchers have demonstrated the exceptional specificity of a new way to switch sequences of the human genome on or off without editing the underlying genetic code. Originally discovered as an antiviral system in...

WHY IT MATTERS Genetic engineering of animals will open up remarkable possibilities in medicine and agriculture but also could lead to new ethical dilemmas. Beagles named Hercules, at left, and Tiangou are the world’s first gene-edited dogs. Man’s best friend is now his newest genetic...

Plants, animals and humans have all suffered from faulty DNA since the dawn of time. This “faulty” DNA is the main cause of many different diseases and conditions, such as cancer, premature death and sickness in general. However, specific parts of DNA are very favorable....

A team of stem cell researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London has applied for approval from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, or HFEA, a national regulatory body, to genetically modify human embryos. According to the scientists, this is to better understand what...

Over the last couple of decades, biologists have honed their tools for deleting, replacing or otherwise editing DNA. Now, a strategy called CRISPR (short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has quickly become one of the most popular ways to do genome engineering. Utilizing...

Eliminating malaria may soon be possible, spreading resistance genes among mosquito populations in a chain reaction driven by CRISPR One of the nightmares associated with genetically modified (GM) crops has been the worry that a genetic change engineered in the laboratory might somehow “escape” from...

Peter Barreras/Invision/APBreakthrough Prize life science laureates Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were among the first to show that CRISPR could be used to edit DNA. Before 2012, researchers Before 2012, researchers interested in studying how bacteria worked knew that microbes defended themselves against certain viruses...

CRISPR topics are hot again now. Since the very beginning researchers found CRISPR sequences in December 1987, it has been widely used in many fields. The credit is obviously. But this year researchers reported that they had edited human embryos with CRISPR, which triggered an...

Cellecta, Inc., a US-based provider of products and services for gene function analysis and biomarker discovery, announced the launch of its pooled CRISPR guide RNA (sgRNA) knockout library targeting all human protein coding genes. CRISPR technology enables researchers to specifically and permanently ‘knock out’ a...

Researchers have successfully used the technique CRISPR/Cas 9 to cut and paste DNA into T-cells of the immune system. The method could lead to new ways to treat cancer, type 1 diabetes and viral infections as well as facilitating research into T-cell function. ‘Genome editing...