Editing the Brain @ University of Maryland School of Medicine
Congrats to Colin Robertson and other lab members for publishing “Prime Editing of Mouse Primary Neurons” on how to use Prime editors on neurons to introduce precise genome edits, including pathological variants from patients.
This paper also includes a step-by-step guide on how to use our web app for pegRNA design and cloning PegAssist.app!
We should be hearing more exciting news from Colin and this powerful new technology for neural somatic genome editing soon…!
Ryan Richardson’s paper describing the development of Cas9-RC, a new CRISPR agent with increased performance for knockin, is out in the October 2023 issue of The CRISPR Journal.
Not only that, but the paper got the cover! Kudos to Cheryl Brandenburg for the beautiful image of knockin neurons and astrocytes using Cas9-RC in the developing mouse brain. Congrats to the whole team for concluding this large piece of Synth Bio meets Dev Neurosci!
We would be delighted to have you try out Cas9-RC for your own knockin needs. Plasmids will become available on Addgene within the next few days!
The lab’s first pub is a nifty piece of synth bio for genome editing the brain. Richardson et al. describe a platform to test and develop new high-precision genome editing reagents. Some of our new CRISPR fusions, like eRad18-Cas9-CtIP with linear donors, showed up to 45-times higher accuracy at point-mutation editing compared to vanilla CRISPR. Another step toward direct in vivo knockin and in situ gene therapy approaches!