USU doctoral student Thomson Hallmark, left, and Ryan Jackson, assistant professor in USU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry publish new findings about CRISPR-associated nuclease Cas12a2 in two papers in Nature. (Photo Credit: USU/M. Muffoletto)
LOGAN – CRISPR is the process in which a bacteria fights a viral infection; when a virus injects its DNA into a bacteria, the bacteria has only minutes to respond to this infection before dying. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; it describes the sequence of repeat DNA in bacteria.
Utah State University Biochemist Ryan Jackson, working with a USU doctoral student Tom Hallmark, both had papers published in the Jan. 4 edition of Nature describing the structure and function of a newly discovered CRISPR immune system.
Dr. Jackson said one feature of CRISPR is that these bacterial immune systems can be used for applications in humans, in agriculture and more.
“The hope is that we can re-purpose this tool to kill cells when needed,” Dr. Jackson explained. “And what would be cool about this is that you could only kill cells that have a genetic signature that labels that cell as diseased. So you can envision a scenario where any type of disease, whether it’s a communicable disease or a cancer or an autoimmune disease, anything like that where there could be a benefit to killing one cell but not all the cells.”
Dr. Jackson said the USU research team decided that Cas12a2 would be the name of the system they have been investigating for six years. He said Cas12a2’s diagnostic capabilities, described in the set of papers published in Nature, could advance efforts to stem the effects of a number of genetic diseases.
More details about the research breakthrough can be seen here:
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