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Category: bioengineering – Page 203

The safety of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing is being debated

When CRISPR-Cas9 is used to edit genomes, off-target DNA damage is more common than previously thought.

A GREAT deal rides on the accuracy of the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9. Since its discovery in 2012 it has become popular for tinkering with genomes of all kinds, thanks to its ability to make editing cheap and easy. Firms such as CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics and Editas Medicine have been built on the idea that it could be used to develop treatments for human diseases. Editas, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced this year that it would work on five new human medicines over the next five years.

In China the technology is already in clinical use. In Hangzhou Cancer Hospital, for example, CRISPR-Cas9 is being employed to engineer immune-system cells removed from patients with cancer of the oesophagus. The hope is that when the engineered cells are returned to a patient’s body, the editing will have improved their ability to attack tumours. More studies involving human beings are expected in other countries for the treatment of beta-thalassaemia, a blood disorder, and Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness. Further ahead, there is hope that CRISPR-Cas9 will help treat diseases such as AIDS, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

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Safe solid-state lithium batteries herald ‘paradigm shift’ in energy storage

The race to produce safe, powerful and affordable solid-state lithium batteries is accelerating and recent announcements about game-changing research using a solid non-flammable ceramic electrolyte known as garnet has some in the race calling it revolutionary.

“This is a paradigm shift in ,” said Kelsey Hatzell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. A paper – “The Effect of Pore Connectivity on Li Dendrite Propagation Within LLZO Electrolytes Observed with Synchrotron X-ray Tomography” – describing her novel research on the failure points of a garnet was published online in March in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters, which was among the most read ACS Letters articles that month.

Lithium-ion batteries typically contain a liquid organic electrolyte that can catch fire. The fire risk is eliminated by the use of a non-flammable garnet-based electrolyte. Replacing liquid electrolytes with a solid organic like garnet also potentially lowers the cost by increasing battery life.

New DNA Synthesis Method Could Soon Build a Genome in a Day

Synthetic biologists are the computer programmers of biology. Their code? DNA.

The whole enterprise sounds fantastical: you insert new snippets of DNA code—in the form of a chain of A, T, C, G letters—into an organism, and bam! Suddenly you have bacteria that can make anti-malaria drugs or cells that can solve complicated logic problems like a computer.

Except it’s not that simple. The basis of synthetic biology is DNA—often a lot of it, in the form of many genes. Making an average gene from scratch costs several hundreds of dollars and weeks of time. Imagine a programmer taking a month to type a new line of code, and you’ll likely understand a synthetic biologist’s frustration.

Researchers confine mature cells to turn them into stem cells

Recent research led by Professor G.V. Shivashankar of the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology (IFOM) in Italy, has revealed that mature cells can be reprogrammed into re-deployable stem cells without direct genetic modification — by confining them to a defined geometric space for an extended period of time.

“Our breakthrough findings will usher in a new generation of stem cell technologies for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that may overcome the negative effects of geonomic manipulation,” said Prof Shivashankar.

The reason thousands of Swedish people are inserting microchips into themselves

Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards, and even rail cards, into their bodies. Once the chip is underneath your skin, there is no longer any need to worry about misplacing a card or carrying a heavy wallet. But for many people, the idea of carrying a microchip in their body feels more dystopian than practical.

Some have suggested that Sweden’s strong welfare state may be the cause of this recent trend. But actually, the factors behind why roughly 3,500 Swedes have had microchips implanted in them are more complex than you might expect. This phenomenon reflects Sweden’s unique biohacking scene. If you look underneath the surface, Sweden’s love affair with all things digital goes much deeper than these microchips.

New CRISPR-Gold technique reduces behavioral autism symptoms in mice

A remarkable new study has successfully used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique to edit a specific gene in mice engineered to have fragile X syndrome (FXS), a single-gene disorder often related to autism. The single gene edit in the live mice resulted in significant improvements in repetitive and obsessive behaviors, making this the first time gene editing has been used to effectively target behavioral symptoms related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

FXS is a genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability, seizures and exaggerated repetitive behavior. Previous studies have shown that the repetitive behaviors associated with FXS are related to a specific excitatory receptor in the brain that, when dysregulated, causes exaggerated signaling between cells.

The CRISPR technique homes in on the gene that controls that excitatory receptor, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5), and essentially disables it, dampening the excessive signaling the corresponds with repetitive behaviors. In mice treated with the new system, obsessive digging behavior was reduced by 30 percent and repetitive leaping actions dropped by 70 percent.

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