The first university to use the Cas9 technique to edit genomes in liver, eye or blood cells – A microbiologist at Beijing’s Broad Institute

Researchers have taken a ribonucleic acid (RNA) that someviruses andbacteria use to attack their hosts and put it to work delivering therapies into human cells.

A microbiologist at Beijing’s Academy of Medical Sciences Institute of Pathogen Biology says it’s astonishing. It is a huge breakthrough.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where the study’s co-author is a PhD student, was the first institution to use the process of gene editing with theCas9 technique. Limited options have restricted most clinical trials to editing genomes in liver, eye or blood cells, because those cells can be reached using the current delivery methods, he says. Brain and kidneys diseases aren’t tackled because there are not good delivery systems.

Using bioluminescent syringes to kill insects and kill humans: The case of Photorhabdus asymbiotica

Last year, Jiang and his colleagues reported that they could manipulate this syringe-like system in the bioluminescent bacterium Photorhabdus asymbiotica, loading proteins of their choosing from mammals, plants and fungi into the syringe2. The bacterium lives in nematodes and is used to transport toxins into the cells of insects that have been bitten. The toxin kills the insect, and the nematode eats the remains. “The bacterium can be viewed as a hired gun to kill this insect,” says co-author Joseph Kreitz, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The P asymbiotica was being designed inZhang’s lab to recognize human cells. The tail fibre is a part of the syringe that is supposed to bind to a proteins on insect cells. The artificial intelligence program AlphaFold predicted mouse and human cells, so the team created a method of modifying the tail fibre so that it would recognize them. “Once we had the image, it was very easy to modify it for our uses,” says Kreitz. “That was the moment when it all came together.”

They then loaded the syringes with various proteins, including Cas9 and toxins that could be used to kill cancer cells, and delivered them into human cells grown in the lab, and into the brains of mice.

Asaf Levy says that the syringe story is similar to the way that researchers such asZhang developed the CRISPR-Cas9 system for use as a genome-editing technique. Similar to the early days of CRISPR–Cas9 research, the bacterial syringes are studied by only a handful of labs, and their roles in microbial ecology are only beginning to be understood.

Levy says that they could have a transformational effect on medicine. The evolution of this thing is amazing, he says. The fact that you can engineer the exact same thing is cool.