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CRISPR-Cas9 has been widely heralded as one of the most important scientific developments of recent years, thanks to its capacity to make edits to the human genome. Now, a more precise version of the tool has been developed by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.
[...] Sometimes, only one base pair in a length of DNA is abnormal in some way – this is called a point mutation, and it accounts for 32,000 of the 50,000 changes in the human genome that have been associated with diseases. A study published in Nature looked at changing an A base into a G; w process that could address around half of those mutations.
[...] "Standard genome-editing methods, including the use of CRISPR-Cas9, make double-stranded breaks in DNA, which is especially useful when the goal is to insert or delete DNA bases," said David Liu, who led the research, speaking to the MIT Technology Review. "But when the goal is to simply fix a point mutation, base editing offers a more efficient and cleaner solution."
This project isn't necessarily a replacement for the CRISPR – it's a different tool that allows for a different kind of edit to be made. The results could have a profound impact on the effect that hereditary diseases can have on people's lives.
Source: https://futurism.com/crispr-can-now-be-used-to-edit-individual-bases/
Programmable base editing of A•T to G•C in genomic DNA without DNA cleavage (DOI: 10.1038/nature24644) (DX)
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday November 05 2017, @07:41PM
The plaques are an interesting problem. Certain indications are that at a low level they are protective rather than injurious. Perhaps getting rid of them would be a mistake, and there merely needs to be a better way to trim them...or to keep excess plaques from being laid against the arterial walls.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.