Genetics, Gene Therapy & Genetic Disease
- Short-duration splice promoting compound enables a tunable mouse model of spinal muscular atrophy
We describe drug treatment paradigms that allow investigation of cellular and molecular pathogenesis at different stages of spinal muscular atrophy in a mouse model.
- Inhibition of a transcriptional repressor rescues hearing in a splicing factor–deficient mouse
The vital role of the splicing factor SRRM4 in vestibular and inner hair cells of the ear is inactivation of the gene repressor REST; however, in outer hair cells, SRRM4 is dispensable for REST inactivation, which SRRM3 accomplishes independently.
- Incipient sympatric speciation in wild barley caused by geological-edaphic divergence
Sympatric speciation is still contentious but here based on genome-wide analysis; we show incipient sympatric speciation of an emerging new wild barley species from Hordeum spontaneum, the progenitor of all cultivated barleys at “Evolution Plateau” (EP), Upper Galilee, Israel.
- multicrispr: gRNA design for prime editing and parallel targeting of thousands of targets
A bioinformatics R package for a fast and generic guideRNA design, optimized for large-scale perturbation assays.
- Biochemical and functional characterization of a meiosis-specific Pch2/ORC AAA+ assembly
The AAA+ protein Pch2 forms a biochemical complex with Orc1/ORC to suppress DNA break formation in the meiotic G2/prophase.
- DDX5 promotes oncogene C3 and FABP1 expressions and drives intestinal inflammation and tumorigenesis
In intestinal epithelial cells (IECs), DDX5 promotes the expression of immune response genes and oncogenes posttranscriptionally and is a novel therapeutic target for treating colitis and intestinal cancers.
- Small molecule inhibitors and a kinase-dead expressing mouse model demonstrate that the kinase activity of Chk1 is essential for mouse embryos and cancer cells
The study use small molecule inhibitors and a kinase-dead expressing mouse model to demonstrate that the kinase activity of Chk1 is essential for mouse embryos and cancer cells.
- RNA exosome mutations in pontocerebellar hypoplasia alter ribosome biogenesis and p53 levels
The work highlights the link between dysfunction of the RNA exosome, ribosome biogenesis, p53-dependent signalling, and apoptosis. Pontocerebellar hypoplasia caused by mutations of the exosome subunits could be classified as a ribosomopathy.
- CDKL3 promotes osteosarcoma progression by activating Akt/PKB
This study demonstrates that CDKL3 regulates Akt activation and its downstream targets to promote OS progression, creating a therapeutically targetable vulnerability in treatment of OS.
- MagnEdit—interacting factors that recruit DNA-editing enzymes to single base targets
This study reports a new, non-covalent strategy—called MagnEdit—that attracts the DNA cytosine deaminase APOBEC3B to a Cas9-directed site for C-to-T editing.