0000-0002-6828-1000   Guest post by Thomas Clements Gene editing technology is continuously evolving. CRISPR-Cas9 mutagenesis hit the world by storm in 2013 and has since been extensively used as a tool to knockout specific genes of interest in vitro, in vivo, and recently even in humans. There have been many improvements to the system, but up until recently no one has described a mechanism to insert novel DNA into specific locations without creating potentially toxic double-strand breaks in DNA. Here, I describe two reports of RNA-guided DNA integration with CRISPR-associated transposases ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000 Guest post by Thomas Clements Jiankui He made waves in November 2018 when he announced he had successfully genetically modified human twin girls using CRISPR. How did he do it? What are the ethical concerns? Are the others out there? Is this a science fiction horror movie come to life? How should we move forward as a community? CRISPR Background When scientists talk about gene editing, they are specifically speaking about tools that target and modify the DNA. Because they target DNA, these tools are used to create novel genetic mutant lines and their induced changes are not ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000 Why we were caught unawares and what we should be doing about this Written by Devang Mehta Dr. He Jiankui, the scientist in China, who revealed this week that he’s created two genome-edited human babies. Image source: The National Academies (CC 2.0) The first CRISPRed babies have been born in China, and from all the noise of the past few days my takeaway is that this inevitable development has caught us all shamefully unprepared. The story began Sunday evening with an article in the MIT Tech Review describing experiments by a scientist in China, Dr. He Jiankui, to make ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000   Written by Adam Amara He Jiankui announcing the birth of the gene-edited twins on YoutubeThe announcement of the first CRISPR gene-edited babies has sparked a major polemic in the scientific community, but also in the media and the public. The research was discreetly carried by a Chinese team lead by He Jiankui at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST), in Shenzhen. He announced in a Youtube video: “Two beautiful little Chinese girls, Lulu and Nana, came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago”. The research team have used CR ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000   Written by Navaneeth Mohan A form of Autism—fragile X syndrome (FXS)—is caused by a repeating genetic sequence in the human brain. This prompted scientists to consider using CRISPR-Cas9, a molecular scissor, to prune the creeper at its roots. However, the conventional CRISPR-Cas9 is delivered via a virus which triggers the body’s immune system to eat up the CRISPR-Cas9 system. A team of researchers based in Texas and California found a golden alternative to the viral delivery system. Literally. CRISPR-Gold delivers the Cas9 and Cpf1 Ribonucleoproteins packaged in a gold n ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000   By Steven Burgess and Iulia Gherman Synthetic biology certainly includes plants, but the field of plant synthetic biology is less developed compared to model heterotrophs or mammalian applications. But plants are important, too important in fact. A recent PNAS paper estimates the amount of global biomass and the contributions of different taxa, and plants are by far the largest contributors to global biomass and dominate terrestrial ecosystems. The last few years’ developments have promised to make plant synthetic biology more approachable, and the interest of plant resea ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000   Yesterday (25 July), the Court of Justice of the European Union made a ruling that surprised many: organisms obtained by targeted mutagenesis techniques are considered in all aspects GM organisms and are subject to the rigid EU rules. The EU ruling comes in stark contrast with this year’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stating that the Department does not plan to regulate “new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods”. The news had an impact on plant and agriculture researchers throughout the ..read more

0000-0003-0319-5416 We continue to improve our ability to read, write, and edit DNA on larger and larger scales. GP-write wants to gather and coordinate the global enthusiasm around large-scale genome engineering to bring about some major advancements in several areas. Overall, they have the goal to reduce of cost of building and testing large genomes by over 1,000-fold within ten years. This major reduction in cost would require large improvements in methods and technology, but large-scale projects like the synthesis of a human genome may be what’s needed to push the field to that point. Rese ..read more

0000-0002-6828-1000   Imagine using synthetic DNA as a sensor recording device. Rost/ShutterstockResearchers believe that DNA – the molecule that stores information about life – could one day be used as a type of sensor, to record information based on its surroundings. Synthetic DNA (not produced in an organism and not containing genetic information of a species) has already been used to store data, as a sort of biological hard drive. But now, MIT researchers Weixin Tang and David Liu say that their CAMERA system (acronym for CRISPR-mediated analogue multi-event recording apparatus) makes bact ..read more

0000-0003-0319-5416 The AACR 2018 Meeting in Chicago is ending today and has featured the major new results in cancer treatment and immunotherapy treatments in particular. Immunotherapy, the use of the patient’s own immune system to attack their cancer, has become a hot area of research and clinical development. While there are several ways in which researchers are approaching immunotherapy, here I’m going through how synthetic biology would like to improve and add to the immunotherapy arsenal against cancer. One of the major drivers of cancer immunotherapy interest is CAR-T (CAR stands for ch ..read more