News by Subject Biology

New research reveals an essential step in scientists' quest to create targeted, RNA-based, more eco-friendly fungicides that protect food crops.

Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntingtin gene (HTT), which appears in adults and features motor, cognitive and psychiatric alterations. The origin of this disease has been associated with the anomalous functioning of the mutated protein: mHTT, but recent data showed the involvement of other molecular mechanisms.

The remarkable genetic scissors called CRISPR/Cas9, the discovery that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sometimes cut in places that they are not designed to target.

Runt-related transcription factor 1 (RUNX1) has been linked to retinal neovascularization and the development of abnormal blood vessels, which result in vision loss in diabetic retinopathy. Now, scientists have found that RUNX1 inhibition presents a new therapeutic approach in the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly worldwide. Their results are reported in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier.

A new study initiated by Wyss Core Faculty member George Church's Synthetic Biology team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and driven by a collaboration with Google Research has applied a computational deep learning approach to design highly diverse capsid variants from the AAV2 serotype across DNA sequences encoding a key protein segment that plays a role in immune-recognition as well as infection of target tissues. The approach has broad implications for designing more effective and safer gene therapies.