CRISPR, crispr genome editing system

It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues revealed the first demonstration of CRISPR. “Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” — CRISPR for short. They designed molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely cut its DNA at a location of choice....

Writing about pancreatic cancer always gives me a pang. My grandmother died from the disease over 30 years ago, but I still remember the anguish of her diagnosis and the years of chemotherapy and surgery she endured before her death. This disease is much more...

Preeminent genetic researchers like David Baltimore, then at MIT, went to the Asilomar conference in 1975 to grapple with the implications of being able to decrypt and reorder genes. It was a God-like power—to plug genes from one living thing into another. Used wisely, it...

With a few easy tweaks, scientists can cut-and-paste DNA inside living cells, thanks to a promising new technique that could make possible everything from testing new drugs or curing genetic diseases. And researchers just discovered a way to make the process a whole lot cheaper and easier, according to a study...

Some DNA sequences appear multiple times in the genome. Here, an RNA guide probe labels repetitive regions in the nucleus of a Xenopus laevis sperm. University of California, Berkeley, researchers have discovered a much cheaper and easier way to target a hot new gene editing...

On April 18, scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, published an article in the obscure open-access journal Protein & Celldocumenting their attempt at using an experimental new method of gene therapy on human embryos. Although the scientific significance of the results remains open...

Applying a dramatically improved method for “editing” genes to human stem cells, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of neuroscience Su-Chun Zhang has shown a new way to silence genes in stem cells and their progeny at any stage of development. The advance has advantages in speed...

The CRISPR gene-editing system just got even better: a new light-activated Cas9 nuclease could offer researchers greater spatial and temporal control over the RNA-guided nuclease activity, according to a study published today (June 15) in Nature Biotechnology. “This is an effective new system for extremely...