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Step aside CRISPR, RNA editing is taking off
Although gene editing is flashy, there are advantages to a more temporary solution. Gene editing needs to be done perfectly the first time or it causes bad permanent consequences. RNA editing can have a dose-dependent, time-limited effect. If bad things start to happen, doses can be removed and the effects reversed. Not so much for DNA editing. The downside is that the RNA to be edited needs to be present in the first place. If a gene is underexpressed or absent, RNA editing won’t help.
Incorporating an allosteric regulatory site in an antibody through backbone design
Protein design has come a long way. Here’s a paper that takes an antibody and redesigns the antibody gene to make it into a sensor for Zinc ions. Basically, nature made this antibody to be an always-on grabber for a molecule called fluorescein. These folks made it grab fluorescein only if there is a bunch of Zinc present. Designing that kind of function with accurate software was a dream 20 years ago.
here’s where pic.twitter.com/HiAdOWC0nx
— poorly drawn lines (@PDLComics) February 12, 2020
Modeling Peptide-Protein Structure and Binding Using Monte Carlo Sampling Approaches: Rosetta FlexPepDock and FlexPepBind.
Imagine you want to cure a viral infection. To do that, you could make a new molecule that binds to a virus coat protein and keeps it out of human cells. But all you have is the virus’s DNA sequence. How do you do it? First, you need to be able to predict what the virus’s coat protein looks like (you can use Rosetta, a computer program for protein structure prediction). Then you need to design a binding molecule (use Rosetta some more, see the paper above). There are other strategies, of course, but this is an interesting one. And I think it’s one that will get better and faster with time.
Dr. Peter B Allen - Lab Blog 