Genome editing has become a widely adopted technology to modify DNA in cells, allowing scientists to study diseases in the lab and develop therapies that repair disease-causing mutations. However, with current approaches, it's only possible to edit cells in one location at a time. Now, a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes has developed a new method that enables them to make precise edits in multiple locations within a cell-;all at once.
Using molecules called retrons, they created a tool that can efficiently modify DNA in bacteria, yeast, and human cells. "We wanted to push the boundaries of genomic technologies by engineering tools to help us study the true complexity of biology and disease," says Associate Investigator Seth Shipman, PhD, senior author of a new study published in Nature Chemical Biology . Shipman is a leader in the nascent and fast-growing field of retrons, which are molecular components from a bacterial immune system that can produce large quantities of DNA.
In 2022, by combining retrons with CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, his lab pioneered a system to edit human cells quickly and efficiently. With the new study, the researchers wanted to use their system to overcome a limitation of current genome editing methods. "If you wanted to edit a cell in multiple locations of the genome that are not near each other, the standard approach before now was to make the modifications one after the other," explains Alejandro González-Delgado, PhD, one of the first .