News from Jennifer Doudna's lab at UC Berkeley, Innovative Genomics Institute. Tweets from lab members and not Jennifer Doudna unless signed JD. Tweets represent personal views only.
doudnalab.org
Doudna Lab
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and here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New pre-print 📣 “Undruggable” cancer mutations remain very hard to target with current modalities. What if we could instead sense mutant transcripts and convert that recognition into selective cell killing?
Check out this work led by postdoc Jingkun Zeng:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Read more here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We present VIPR, a phage-encoded RNA-guided system that recognizes DNA with a noncontiguous code unlike CRISPR.
Tiny, programmable, possibly ancestral to CRISPR immunity; VIPR is built around a striking RNA-DNA-DNA triplex.
We programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2 to recognize cancer mutations, especially in TP53, and selectively kill mutant cells through transcript-activated chromatin shredding.
We now present our latest work, now out in @nature.com! A creative new CRISPR-based approach can selectively destroy cells carrying undruggable mutations in cancer.
Work led by @jingkunzeng.bsky.social
In collaboration with Alan Ashworth, Yang Liu and Ryan Jackson.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A big challenge for CRISPR gene editing 🧬 is altering a high enough proportion of target cells in the body 🧪
So @doudna-lab.bsky.social have developed editors that can amplify themselves by spreading from cell to cell
Comment from @gaetanburgio.bsky.social
www.newscientist.com/article/2514...
Our lab is proud to present our latest work harnessing Bridge Recombinase for genome-scale editing in diverse bacteria, microbiome editing, and programmable horizontal gene transfer.
In our new work published in @natbiomedeng.nature.com in collaboration with @theottlab.bsky.social and @doudna-lab.bsky.social, we introduce "interfering" guide RNAs (igRNA) for CRISPR-Cas13a that regulate enzyme activity after activation. Congrats to all the authors!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A multiplexed RNA detection method exploits crRNA-dependent variability in Cas13a activity on RNA targets for kinetic barcoding and can be used to distinguish among SARS-CoV-2 variants in clinical sam...
Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR.
We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets.
Thread + link below.
Bridge recombinase enables versatile rewriting of bacterial genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.29.721476v1
