{"id":122025,"date":"2021-04-27T13:22:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T20:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/a-new-crispr-tool-flips-genes-on-and-off-like-a-light-switch"},"modified":"2021-04-27T13:22:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T20:22:19","slug":"a-new-crispr-tool-flips-genes-on-and-off-like-a-light-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/a-new-crispr-tool-flips-genes-on-and-off-like-a-light-switch","title":{"rendered":"A New CRISPR Tool Flips Genes On and Off Like a Light Switch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-new-crispr-tool-flips-genes-on-and-off-like-a-light-switch2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Why not add a light switch instead?<\/p>\n<p>This month, a team from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) reimagined <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/tag\/crispr\/\">CRISPR<\/a> to do just that. Rather than directly acting on genes\u2014irrevocably dicing away or swapping genetic letters\u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/cell\/fulltext\/S0092-8674(21)00353-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867421003536%3Fshowall%3Dtrue\">the new CRISPR variant<\/a> targets the biological machinery that naturally turns genes on or off.<\/p>\n<p>Translation? CRISPR can now \u201cflip a light switch\u201d to control genes\u2014without ever touching them directly. It gets better. The new tool, CRISPRoff, can cause a gene to stay silent for hundreds of generations, even when its host cells morph from stem cells into more mature cells, such as neurons. Once the \u201csleeping beauty\u201d genes are ready to wake up, a complementary tool, CRISPRon, flips the light switch back on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why not add a light switch instead? This month, a team from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) reimagined CRISPR to do just that. Rather than directly acting on genes\u2014irrevocably dicing away or swapping genetic letters\u2014 the new CRISPR variant targets the biological machinery that naturally turns genes on or off. Translation? CRISPR can [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}