Analysing the data recently presented by Jiankui He and assuming that it is authentic shows that the goal of abolishing the expression of CCR5 may have been reached for one of the resulting twins, although this remains to ...

A new approach, based on the use of peptide nucleic acid molecules to form triple helices and promote locus-specific recombination, demonstrates potential for in vivo gene correction at clinically significant levels and ...

The synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome comprising only 473 genes is an impressive achievement, yet it is only a step towards a really synthetic genome based on first principles: this set of genes was derived from a ...

The planned acquisition of Pacific Biosciences by Illumina could signal a big change in the DNA sequencing landscape, and provides the incentive for an update on a field that still has a number of players and could be ...

A newly developed technique allows the analysis of gene expression within tissues at near-cellular resolution. This opens a whole range of applications and will be a major ingredient of future studies.

The first therapy based on chimeric antigen receptors has been approved by the FDA. It gives excellent results in recurrent paediatric ALL; its cost is very high but fairly consistent with the clinical benefit (long term ...

A novel gene editing procedure based on a nuclease from the Argonaute protein family was described in mid-2016 and appeared to provide significant advantages over the now widely used CRISPR-Cas9 system. Attempts by numerous ...

There are now a number of cases in which non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has detected signs of cancer in pregnant women. These unexpected findings raise a number of difficult questions regarding their communication ...

Viable human embryos carrying a disease mutation have now been corrected by CRISPR-Cas9 editing. Although the correction is not perfect, and the embryos have not been implanted, this brings us closer to human germline ...