Powerful new gene-editing tools may fix hundreds of diseases


US scientists unveiled on Wednesday two new mo lecular editing tools designed to fix mutations that cause the majority of human genetic diseases, some of which have no known treatment.

One technique, by David Liu of Harvard University and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, offers a highly precise way to fix singleletter mistakes in genes, which are stretches of DNA. The second, by Broad Institute molecular biologist Feng Zhang, focuses on editing RNA, which carries the genetic instructions to make proteins, without altering DNA.

Both techniques build off of the game-changing CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, a type of molecular scissors for trimming unwanted parts of the human genome to replace with new stretches of DNA. The genome consists of six billion DNA letters, or chemical bases. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal `Nature', Liu and colleagues build on his pioneering work called base editing. Unlike CRISPR, which causes breaks in DNA, base editing chemically corrects singleletter errors in DNA. “CRISPR is like scissors, and base editors are like pencils,“ Liu said.

Base editing tinkers with DNA 's four chemical bases, ade nine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). It takes two bases to form base pairs that make up rungs in the spiral DNA ladder, and they follow specific rules -C pairs with G, and T pairs with A...Read more

 

Source web Page: Times of IndiaHe


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