CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing may be the hot new way to manipulate gene expression, but other gene manipulation systems remain valuable to biology. Cre-lox recombination, discovered in the 1980s, is one of the most important ways to spatially and temporally control gene expression, ...
As MIT's Ed Boyden explains it, his goal is "to understand the brain at a level of abstraction that enables the engineering of its function." Once scientists can do that, they will not only understand how the brain works, but also how to fix it when things go awry. To reach that ...
When neuroscience graduate student Silvana Konermann first entered Feng Zhang’s lab at MIT, the use of customizable DNA-binding domains based on transcription-activator-like effectors (TALEs) as anchors for genome engineering applications was still very new. Now, Konermann and ...
