By Emily P. Bentley
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The first base editors revolutionized CRISPR gene editing. Cytosine base editors (CBEs) and adenine base editors (ABEs) chemically modify target bases without breaking the DNA backbone, making them efficient and precise tools for altering DNA sequences. These first base editors ...
Early CRISPR applications were often limited by the low editing efficiency of homology-directed repair (HDR), the pathway for resolving DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) preferred by researchers. Compared to non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), HDR occurs at a relatively low ...
Base editors create specific point mutations in the genome, but they’re inefficient compared to CRISPR/Cas9 edits that rely on double strand DNA breaks. Due to this inefficiency it is crucial for scientists to not only easily identify base editing events in real-time but also ...
Adenine base editors (ABE) mediate A•T-to-G•C base changes (Figure 1), but it can be challenging to make these base changes, especially in primary human cells. Now, scientists at Beam Therapeutics have found a way to improve editing in primary human cells (Gaudelli et al., ...
David Liu’s lab created the first base editor in 2016 (Komor et al., 2016) and since then has been trying to expand their precision editing capabilities. Base editors make specific DNA base changes and consist of a catalytically impaired Cas protein (dCas or Cas nickase) fused ...
This post was contributed by Kutubuddin Molla, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University. Imagine you are dealing with a defective gene, Xm, the sequence of which is identical to the correct gene, Xw, except for a single base. If you heard about CRISPR, ...
