By modifying a single variable, temperature, Yale geneticists have expanded the potential uses of a groundbreaking gene-editing technology.
The CRISPR-Cpf1 gene-editing technology has proved to be highly efficient in mice but not in other model organisms. The Yale team showed that temperature is a key factor controlling Cpf1 activity and have optimized this technology allowing researchers to make targeted genetic changes in a host of model organisms such as zebrafish and the fruit fly Drosophila.
“With these optimizations, we can modify genomes of every other organism,” said lead author Miguel A. Moreno-Mateos.
“Now, we have a robust system able to efficiently edit regions in the genome not targetable by other CRISPR systems and this activity can be easily controlled just by changing the temperature.”
Reference: “CRISPR-Cpf1 mediates efficient homology-directed repair and temperature-controlled genome editing” by Miguel A. Moreno-Mateos, Juan P. Fernandez, Romain Rouet, Charles E. Vejnar, Maura A. Lane, Emily Mis, Mustafa K. Khokha, Jennifer A. Doudna and Antonio J. Giralde, 8 December 2017, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01836-2
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