Researchers have discovered a gene-editing technique that allows for cutting, pasting, and swapping around genetic sequences in a single step.
The mechanism, which they have dubbed “bridge recombination,” takes advantage of a naturally occurring genetic phenomenon — transposable elements — which are gene sequences that can jump from one portion of the gene to another. (They’re sometimes called jumping genes.) Researchers led by Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the Arc Institute and the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and Hiroshi Nishimasu, a structural bioscientist at the Univ. of Tokyo, determined how these transposable elements relocate themselves and learned that the process can be adapted and programmed for targeted gene editing.
The method could have advantages over other gene-editing methods that have been developed, such as RNA interference and CRISPR-Cas9. RNA interference is a method that allows genes to be silenced, whereas CRISPR-Cas9 uses bacterial molecules to slice a genome and insert new genetic sequences. Bridge recombination can insert genetic sequences as well as excise them or invert them; it can also allow for the manipulation of longer genetic sequences than other methods, up to hundreds of thousands of base pairs.
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