The geneticist is talking about the CRISPR revolution
George m. Church, a distinguished professor of genetics at harvard medical school and a core member of the Wyss institute, has been hailed as a pioneer in human genomics and synthetic biology.
In 1984, Church and Walter Gilbert published the first direct genome sequencing method, and some strategies are still being used in second-generation sequencing.
In addition, he developed multimolecular techniques and barcode labels, and was one of the inventors of the nanopore sequencing technology.
In September 2014, George m. Church, a professor at the leadership team of harvard medical school, the development of single molecule interactions sequencing (SMI - Seq) technology, this technology can realize the parallel analysis of single molecular level, get a lot of protein interactions.
Then in November, he led the team at harvard medical school, where he conducted CRISPR gene editing in human iPS cells.
They combined whole-genome sequencing and targeted deep sequencing to identify the off-target effect of Cas9 editing iPS cells, and identified a single nucleotide variant that affects Cas9 specificity (SNV).
In terms of gene expression, people mainly study one gene at a time.
In march last year, researchers at the Wyss institute at Harvard University developed a revolutionary technique using CRISPR/Cas9 under the leadership of George Church.
The technique can reveal the effects of a series of genetic circuits on biological processes, and can also accurately guide stem cell differentiation and generate the transplant organs needed for regenerative medicine.
Then in July, the team developed a predictive software that could pinpoint the most effective ways to use crispr-cas9 gene editing techniques to achieve gene targeting.
On June 1, 2016, George Church as a corresponding author, in The international famous journals "The FEBS Journal" published titled "The Next stop for The CRISPR revolution: RNA guided epigenetic regulators" review articles, talk CRISPR The revolutionary technology of The Next station: RNA guide epigenetic regulation factors.
The Cas protein associated with CRISPR and CRISPR provides a ground-breaking platform for inexpensive, programmable, and effective sequence specific DNA targeting.
The crispr-cas system is naturally equipped to target DNA through its natural nuclease activity.
Therefore, the research group dedicated to various organisms quickly adopted the technique and pioneered the use of the genome sequence editing of more than 20 different species.
However, the biological code of life is encoded not only in genetics but also in epigenetics.
While gene sequence editing is a powerful capability, we must also be able to edit and control transcription and epigenetics code.
Inspired by early sequencing specific targeted technologies (such as ZFs and TALEs), researchers quickly expanded the crispr-cas9 toolkit to include transcriptional activation, inhibition and epigenetic modification.
In this review article, the author highlighted the CRISPR - Cas9 toolbox extended for transcriptional and epigenetic regulation and control the progress, also discussed the best practices guide, these tools as well as for the future of its application were discussed.
Summarized in the end, the author concludes that the CRISPR and Cas9 based tools, has met the genome editing and epigenetic regulation required for an effective platform, programmable, easy to use.
As a result, the field is developing rapidly and finding new ways to adapt to the system and finding new rules to improve the efficiency of these tools.
These tools have opened up the possibility of rapid and large-scale genome scanning to detect functional gains and loss of functionality, drawing a functional network with unprecedented depth and precision.
Although transcriptional and epigenetic regulation factor, based on the CRISPR remains to be seen in the characterization of several aspects, such as the relative merits of these instruments, miss activity of the exact level as well as the body's ability to transfer these tools.
However, researchers still foresee there will be many exciting applications, such as by regulating the expression of endogenous locus on, to detect new kinds of coding gene function, and applied to the new paradigm of human gene therapy.