Butterflies are uniquely stunning examples of the diversity of patterns and colors organisms can develop in nature. Many species evolve to display these numerous patterns in response to pressures from their environment. Well-camouflaged wings are more likely to go unnoticed by predators, and similarly, non-toxic butterflies with patterns that mimic poisonous species are less likely to be eaten. Thus, individuals with such advantageous physical characteristics can pass on their genetic makeup to subsequent generations, furthering the species’ adaptation to its environment. A long-standing quest ..read more

Identifying the biological functions that have changed over time to make us human has traditionally been a long and laborious task. Researchers would look in the genomes of humans and our closest relatives, the great apes, and look for any changes. And if a change seemed important, they could then test it out to see what it did.  However, a team of researchers from UCSF and MIT recently decided to look for shifts in function on a much larger scale. Their goal was to identify genes which differed in their impact on cell growth in human and chimpanzee stem cells. To do this, they used a tec ..read more

by Corena Loeb The post Know your gene editing technology: CRISPR-CAS9 appeared first on Science in the News ..read more

Originally developed in the 1960s for pest control, gene drives are a technology in which organisms are engineered to keep desired genes propagating within their population. There is much interest in further developing gene drives to prevent the transmission of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever through mosquitoes or other vectors. However, scientists and ethicists have raised concerns over the potential unchecked spread of gene drives across an entire population. With rising fear over the ecological impact and unpredictable ramifications of altering or removing an entire species, scien ..read more

Current data storage technology uses hard drives and data disks to store data at the click of a button. However, just as these methods replaced the magnetic tapes and floppy disks before them, they are likely to be overtaken by updated methods in the future. One such medium being explored is DNA, the molecule that stores the genetic information of biological organisms. Researchers at Columbia University have now discovered a way to engineer living bacteria to store data in their DNA. This is appealing because DNA storage is 1,000 times more dense than the most compact hard disk, enabling stora ..read more

An important gap in developing new cancer treatments has been the development of safe and efficient delivery systems for getting drugs into cancer cells once they are in our bodies. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have recently developed a new CRISPR-based genome editing therapy using a cutting-edge delivery system. Their research uses the CRISPR technology, where a special kind of protein called an enzyme cuts specific DNA sequences to introduce mutations. Because the large size of this enzyme makes it hard to enter cancer cells, current research into CRISPR cancer treatments have shown lo ..read more

Ever since the development of the revolutionary gene editing tool, the CRISPR-Cas9 system, the field of biomedical research has completely changed. Now, scientists can more easily study important genes by using the CRISPR-Cas9 system to mutate or delete the genes, and then observing the downstream effects. Recently, researchers from John Hopkins University developed a newly improved gene editing tool: a very fast CRISPR-Cas9 system (vfCRISPR). This new system, as the name suggests, is extremely fast — instead of the usual few hours that the conventional CRISPR-Cas9 system takes, it allows gene ..read more

With the re-opening of societies around the world, increased access to diagnostic tests for diseases like COVID-19 is necessary for public health and appropriate disease tracking and response. PCR-based tests and the more recently developed antigen tests are the primary diagnostics used for SARS-CoV-2 specifically. However, tracking more than just SARS-CoV-2 would give scientists and policy makers a much more well-rounded picture of the current state of public health. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a test that can confirm not only SARS-CoV-2, but hundreds of other disease-causing viruse ..read more

Vaccines were essential for the near eradication of major diseases such as polio and smallpox, and still play a major role in the fight. For example, the Sabin’s antipolio vaccine drastically reduced the global incidence of polio from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to merely 176 cases in 2019! It may seem like the poliovirus is well on its way to be completely removed from the world, but unfortunately, in recent years, there have been emerging cases of polio again. Why is that so? Currently, the main antipolio vaccine used in the world is the oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV), which contains w ..read more

CRISPR has been in the news for its revolutionary use in new medicines and its controversial use in embryo editing. That’s because CRISPR enables researchers to make precise cuts in DNA to change an organism’s genetic code with minimal time and effort.  It’s easy to forget that CRISPR was not invented for these purposes, but in fact evolved in bacteria as an immune system to defend against bacteriophages (“phages”), viruses that specialize in infecting bacteria. It is also the case that CRISPR isn’t just one system; it represents a wide array of related defense systems spanning 6 types, a ..read more