Scientists are constantly discovering new genes or the proteins they code for, but it's much harder to figure out their role in the body or in disease. Key to discovering this role is disabling the gene to see what happens when it's removed.
While CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool can accelerate the process of making knockout cell lines, researchers must sometimes make and screen many variations of the genetic scissors to find one that works well. The UC Berkeley researchers found that this process can be made many times more efficient with a simple tweak with which CRISPR-Cas9 cuts and disables genes up to fivefold, in most types of human cells, making it easler to create and study knockout cell lines and, potentially, disable a mutant gene as a form of human therapy.
The key is introducing into the cell, along with the CRISPR-Cas9 protein, short pieces of DNA that do not match any DNA sequences in the human genome. The short pieces of DNA, called oligonucleotides, seem to interfere with the DNA repair mechanisms in the cell to boost the editing performance of even mediocre CRISPR-Cas9s between 2½ and 5 times.
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-crispr-cas9-genes-disrupt-dna.html
While CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool can accelerate the process of making knockout cell lines, researchers must sometimes make and screen many variations of the genetic scissors to find one that works well. The UC Berkeley researchers found that this process can be made many times more efficient with a simple tweak with which CRISPR-Cas9 cuts and disables genes up to fivefold, in most types of human cells, making it easler to create and study knockout cell lines and, potentially, disable a mutant gene as a form of human therapy.
The key is introducing into the cell, along with the CRISPR-Cas9 protein, short pieces of DNA that do not match any DNA sequences in the human genome. The short pieces of DNA, called oligonucleotides, seem to interfere with the DNA repair mechanisms in the cell to boost the editing performance of even mediocre CRISPR-Cas9s between 2½ and 5 times.
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-crispr-cas9-genes-disrupt-dna.html
