On July 10, Science Advances published online the latest research results titled “Engineering a far-red light–activated split-Cas9 system for remote-controlled genome editing of internal organs and tumors”. The research was accomplished by Prof. Ye Haifeng’s team from the School of Life Sciences of ECNU, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Regulatory Biology, and ECNU Medical Synthetic Biology Research Center.
This research result, which successfully develops the split-Cas9 gene editing system (FAST system for short) controlled by far-red light, is another achievement made by Prof. Ye Haifeng’s team that unlocks new functions of the far-red light.
In 2017 and 2018, the team published “Smartphone-controlled optogenetically engineered cells enable semiautomatic glucose homeostasis in diabetic mice” and “Synthetic far-red light-mediated CRISPR-dCas9 device for inducing functional neuronal differentiation” in Science Translational Medicine as the cover article and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PNAS, respectively.
As a precise and time-space-controllable gene editing technology platform, this research has provided a new type of controllable gene editing tool and expanded the current CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing toolbox. It is expected to be applied to the study of gene functions and the precise and controllable treatment of various diseases such as genetic diseases and tumors.
Yu Yuanhuan, a PhD student of the School of Life Sciences at ECNU, is the first author and Prof. Ye Haifeng from the School of Life Sciences is the corresponding author. The research has been funded by the “Synthetic Biology” key special project under the National Key Research and Development Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the major synthetic biology project supported by the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission.
Prof. Ye Haifeng and the first author Yu Yuanhuan, a PhD student of the School of Life Sciences at ECNU.
Source: the School of Life Sciences
Copywriter: Philip Nash
Eidtor: Linlan Zhang
