(Yicai) Aug. 7 — Chinese researchers have developed two advanced DNA editing tools that could lead to breakthroughs in crop breeding and new treatments for cancer and genetic diseases.<\/p>\n
A team led by Gao Caixia at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences created the tools to enable large-scale chromosomal rearrangements in both plant and human cells, according to a recent paper published in Cell, a US-based journal.<\/p>\n
The scientists successfully engineered a 315-kilobase DNA rearrangement that enabled rice plants to survive herbicide treatment without damage. They also achieved a much larger 12-megabase inversion at sites associated with human diseases.<\/p>\n
While genome editing has made major strides in recent years, challenges remain in achieving precise, large-scale modifications in complex organisms. Existing tools often suffer from inefficiency, limited editing range, and the presence of “scars” — unwanted DNA fragments left behind after editing, the paper said.<\/p>\n
To overcome these obstacles, the team enhanced the existing Cre-Lox system, a genetic engineering platform developed in the 1980s. They built a high-throughput engineering platform and introduced a novel approach by targeting asymmetric Lox sites instead of the traditional symmetrical sequences. This significantly improved editing precision and reduced the risk of unintended genetic changes, lowering DNA reversal by a factor of 10.<\/p>\n
The researchers also used an artificial intelligence-informed model to create AiCErec, a recombinase engineering method that boosts the DNA recombination performance of the Cre recombinase enzyme by 3.5 times.<\/p>\n
To address the issue of post-editing scars, the team developed Re-pegRNA, a cleanup technique using specially designed pegRNAs to remove residual sequences after DNA recombination.<\/p>\n
This pioneering research not only addresses long-standing limitations of the Cre-Lox system but also paves the way for more precise genome engineering in a variety of organisms, the team concluded.<\/p>\n
Editor: Emmi Laine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Yicai) Aug. 7 — Chinese researchers have developed two advanced DNA editing tools that could lead to breakthroughs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[323,1204,1395,117319,57338,46177,36916,267,46175,51066,3912,90399,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-324962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-cancer","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-cre-lox","12":"tag-dna-manipulation","13":"tag-genetic-diseases","14":"tag-genetic-engineering","15":"tag-genetics","16":"tag-genome-editing","17":"tag-human","18":"tag-medicine","19":"tag-plant","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-uk","22":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114987062138383931","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}