An army of tiny robots scuttling about inside your mouth cleaning your teeth. It’s a disquieting thought, and yet it might be one of the most effective ways to deal with the sticky bacterial biofilms that coat our choppers – as well as water pipes, catheters and other tough-to-clean items.
Anyone who’s been laid up for an extended period due to illness or injury will know how difficult it can be to get moving again. Long-term immobility can see a loss of muscle mass that can be hard to regain, especially for the elderly. In research on mice, a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that the injection of a type of cells known to promote blood vessel growth helps accelerate to restoration of muscle mass lost due to inactivity.
Biomedical engineers at Duke University, North Carolina, have developed a method for improving the accuracy of CRISPR genome editing by an average of 50-fold. They believe it can be easily translated to any of the technology’s continually expanding formats.
The approach adds a short tail to the guide RNA which is used to identify a sequence of DNA for editing. This added tail folds back and binds onto itself, creating a “lock” that can only be undone by the targeted DNA sequence.
“CRISPR is generally incredibly accurate, but there are examples that have shown off-target activity, so there’s been broad interest across the field in increasing specificity,” said Charles Gersbach, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke. “But the solutions proposed thus far cannot be easily translated between different CRISPR systems.”
Posted in biotech/medical
Without ensuring high levels of accuracy, any proposed CRISPR gene therapy becomes a genetic crapshoot.
Now, a team from Duke University may have found a universal workaround—a trick to fundamentally boost CRISPR’s accuracy in almost all its forms. Published this month in Nature Biotechnology, the team’s study tweaked the design of guide RNAs, the indispensable targeting “blood hound” of the CRISPR duo that hunts down specific DNA sequences before its partner Cas makes the cut.
The upgrade is deceptively simple: tag a “locking” structure to one end of the guide RNA so that only the targeted DNA can unleash the power of the Cas scissors. Yet exactly because the tweak is so easy, guide RNA 2.0 can fundamentally tune the accuracy of multiple CRISPR systems—not just those relying on the classic Cas9, but also newer diagnostic systems that deploy Cas12a and other flavors—by as much as 200-fold.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reportedly interested in a new wirelessly-connected contact lens recently unveiled in France, the latest in the agency’s ongoing search for small-scale technology to augment U.S. service members’ visual capabilities in the field.
(Editor’s note: This podcast is from The Not Old – Better Show.)
As part of our Inside Science and Technology interview series, today’s show is an interview with Dr. Pradeep Reddy, a research scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
As we all know in the Not Old Better Show audience, aging is a leading risk factor for a number of debilitating conditions, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, to name a few. This makes the need for anti-aging therapies all the more urgent. Now, Salk Institute researchers have developed a new gene therapy that is showing promise as a possible way to decelerate the aging process in humans. It uses CRISPR genome-editing technology.
