Another potentially game-changing discovery has come out of the lab of Feng Zhang, PhD. This time, they uncovered the first programmable RNA-guided system in eukaryotes. Just a few months ago, the Zhang lab adapted a contractile injection system, found naturally in bacteria, that deliver protein payloads to target human cells.
In this recent work, Zhang’s team describes how the system—based on the Fanzor protein—uses RNA as a guide to target DNA precisely, and that Fanzor can be reprogrammed to edit the genome of human cells. Additionally, the compact Fanzor systems have the potential to be more easily delivered to cells and tissues as therapeutics than CRISPR/Cas systems, and further refinements to improve their targeting efficiency could make them a valuable new technology for human genome editing.
The research is published in Nature, in the paper, “Fanzor is a eukaryotic programmable RNA-guided endonuclease.”
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