U of T researchers develop RNA-targeting technology for precisely manipulating parts of human genes
U of T researchers develop RNA-targeting technology for precisely manipulating parts of human genes
Researchers at the University of Toronto have harnessed a bacterial immune defense system, known as CRISPR, to efficiently and precisely control the process of RNA splicing.
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I love that crispr is so amazing and that we are regularly improving on it.
It was revolutionary when it was first isolated from bacteria. Always fascinating to me that it's pretty much the bacterial adaptive immune system. Now it's awesome seeing other scientists dial in the precision of an already game changing advancement.
its sorta sad for me as I went to school for it and expected things like this to come out of viruses.
Sorry for the delayed reply, but I studied in this field as welll, so curious why you thought CRISPR would be associated with viruses over bacteria or even mold/yeast?
well because their whole life cycle is about inserting into dna (although not really as many just keep the dna as seperate plasmids). I would think its proteins would be more specialized to the task but turns out does sorta come from them as the crispr genes originated from bacteriaphages but the bacteria use them to now defend against them.
Well, only very specific viruses entry the nucleus, most often due to not bringing along enzymes needed for replication. Then, there's transducing viruses and non-transducing viruses, of which only one will retain it's genome in the host genome. Both occur near oncogenic gene locations too, which is why viral infections can lead to cancer, but this isn't very common at all. IDK, guess I've always felt bacteria are way more complex and that it makes sense CRISPR comes from them. Bacterial viruses, aka bacteria phages, were the evolutionary pressure which lead to CRISPR's development. But I'm a nerd and stay up to date with it all, so maybe that shifted my outlook.