QuickBiology News

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a disease that remains incurable by conventional chemotherapy. SF3B1 is a splicing factor, a core component of the U2 snRNP of the spliceosome, and associates with the U2 snRNA and branch point adenosine of the pre-mRNA. Recurrent somatic mutations in SF3B1 have been linked to CLL. In CLL, mutations in the heat-repeat domain of SF3B1 is shown to associate with poor clinical outcome. Previous whole transcript profiling mainly focused on exon level using Illumina short reads NGS platform. The extent to which full-length isoforms contribute to such disease due to splicing regulator SF3B1 mutations are not well characterized. Read More

Stem cell therapy or regenerative medicine promotes the repair response of diseased, injured, or dysfunctional tissues using stem cells. The important biosafety for the use of human pluripotent stem cells is to make sure there are not any mutations, especially in genes associated with cancer that occurred during stem cell in vitro propagation. Read More

Human cancer cell lines have been a driving force in cancer research. The NCI-60 Human Tumor Cell Lines cover 60 different human tumor cell lines, representing leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, colon, brain, ovary, breast, prostate, and kidney cancers (ref1). The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) project started in 2008 as a collaboration between the Broad Institute, and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and its Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (ref2). Read More

Autism is a serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 54 children in the United States today. It is a genetic disorder in multiple genes.Read More

COVID-19 cases continue to rise across countries. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Broad Institute recently has developed new COVID-19 tests called eRPA (enhanced Recombinase Polymerase Amplification) and SHINE (SHERLOCK and HUDSON Integration to Navigate Epidemics), two complementary diagnostic platforms that deliver accurate results with minimal equipment. Read More

Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976, it has been infecting people, leading to outbreaks in several African countries. Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare and deadly zoonotic disease in human and non-human primates. Understanding the virus life cycle (e.g. host preferences/transmission, virus survival rate/stability in certain environments) helps us prevent infection. Understanding virus-host cell interaction can be the key to novel therapeutics or vaccines.Read More

In recent years, single-cell transcriptome sequencing technology has provided powerful tools for solving key biomedical problems. Although the single-cell transcriptome solves the problem of cell heterogeneity, it cannot restore its specific spatial location, and it is impossible to accurately explore cell functions. Spatial transcriptomics can fill this gap. Using spatial transcriptome technology, researchers can locate the gene expression information of cells in the tissue to the original spatial position of the tissue, thereby analyzing the differences in the function and gene expression of different parts of the tissue.Read More

CRISPR is a promising tool for correcting genetic defects to prevent or cure genetic disease.  However, gene therapy targeting DNA is irreversible, is potentially damaging to germline cells. Therefore, it has been of great interest to target RNA in somatic cells while avoiding permanent off-target genomic edits.Read More

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has changed diagnostic workflows and provided an unprecedented, simple way of discovering rare genomic diseases (QB News). Through whole genome sequencing (WGS) or whole exome sequencing (WES), scientists can trace genetic defects to mutations in a single gene. However, as only ~ 1% of the human genome is the coding region, many polymorphisms discovered from patients remain undiagnosed, and such genomic screening diagnostic rates are only 25-30%.Read More

We discussed methods that figure out spatial (location) and temporal resolution in single-cell RNA profiling. ScNT-seq (single-cell metabolically labeled new RNA tagging sequencing) developed by Wu’s Lab as we discussed before, only gives information of newly synthesized transcripts, it lacks the time scale about dynamics of gene expression. To build up a picture of the transcriptional history of a single cell, In Nature Biotechnology, Young scientist Fei Chen at Broad Institute developed RNA timestamps approach for inferring the age of individuals RNAs in RNA profiling by exploiting RNA editing.Read More