Genome editing is revolutionizing biology

Revolutionizing male fertility factor research in mice by using the genome editing tool CRISPR/Cas9

Background Reproductive research is quintessential in understanding not only the cause of infertility, but also for creating family planning tools. The knockout (KO) system approach is conducive to discovering genes that are essential for fertility in mice. However, in vivo research has been limited due to its high cost and length of time needed to establish KO mice. Methods The mechanisms be...

Genome Editing



Seeing is understanding. Improvements in computer software and hardware are revolutionizing three-dimensional imaging in biology.

Apicture is worth a thousand words. For scientists in particular, it is often easier to draw a signal transduction pathway or a large organic molecule in order to understand it than it is to describe it using words or numbers. As human sensory equipment relies heavily on visual input, our brains find it much easier to process information from an image—the question is how to “represent data in a...

Shotguns and SNPs: how fast and cheap sequencing is revolutionizing plant biology.

In 1998 Cereon Genomics LLC, a subsidiary of Monsanto Co., performed a shotgun sequencing of the Arabidopsis thaliana Landsberg erecta genome to a depth of twofold coverage using 'classic' Sanger sequencing. This sequence was assembled and aligned to the Columbia ecotype sequence produced by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative. The analysis provided tens of thousands of high-confidence prediction...

Advancing Chimeric Antigen Receptor-Engineered T-Cell Immunotherapy Using Genome Editing Technologies: Challenges and Future Prospects

Chimeric antigen receptor engineered-T (CAR-T) cells also named as living drugs, have been recently known as a breakthrough technology and were applied as an adoptive immunotherapy against different types of cancer. They also attracted widespread interest because of the success of B-cell malignancy therapy achieved by anti-CD19 CAR-T cells. Current genetic toolbox enabled the synthesis of CARs ...