News by Subject Biology

* Patients with glioma - a very common type of tumour originating in the brain - see improvement in survival rates with combined treatment of radiotherapy plus temozolomide * Researchers found a novel mechanism on how tumours evade chemotherapy through genomic rearrangements of the MGMT DNA repair gene * This finding is potentially relevant for updating the methods used to monitor temozolomide efficacy. Genomic rearrangement could be a marker to be detected in blood samples and help make therapeutic decisions

Of the CRISPR-Cas9 tools created to date, base editors have gotten lots of attention because of their seemingly simple editing: they neatly replace one nucleic acid with another, in many cases all that should be needed to fix a genetic disease. UC Berkeley scientists have now determined the structure of the latest base editor as it swaps out nucleic acids, showing why it can go off target but also how it can be improved.

A group of Japanese scientists has succeeded in the development of modified messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that contain sulfur atoms in the place of oxygen atoms of phosphate moieties of natural mRNAs. They discovered that modified mRNAs accelerated the initiation step of the translation reactions and improved efficiency of protein synthesis by at least 20 times compared with that using natural-form mRNAs.

Cas proteins like CRISPR-Cas9 have great potential for gene therapy to treat human disease and for altering crop genes, but the gene-targeting and gene-cutting Cas proteins are often large and hard to ferry into cells with viral vectors such as adenovirus. UC Berkeley scientists have now discovered a hypercompact Cas protein, CasΦ, that should work better. It is half the size of Cas9 and apparently evolved inside a bacteriophage, yet efficiently snips double-stranded DNA.