Schizophrenia is a genetically related mental illness, in which the majority of genetic alterations occur in the non-coding regions of the human genome. In the past decade, a growing number of regulatory non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) including microRNAs (miRNAs) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been identified to be strongly associated with schizophrenia. However, the studies of these ncRNAs ...

A major objective in biological research is to understand spatial and temporal requirements for any given gene, especially in dynamic processes acting over short periods, such as catalytically driven reactions, subcellular transport, cell division, cell rearrangement and cell migration. The interrogation of such processes requires the use of rapid and flexible methods of interfering with gene f...

Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) such as gefitinib and erlotinib are effective against lung adenocarcinomas harboring epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations. However, cancer cells can develop resistance to these agents with prolonged exposure; in over 50% of cases, this is attributable to the EGFR T790M mutation. Moreover, additional resistance mutations can arise with the use of ne...

Cellulose is the utmost plenteous source of biopolymer in our earth, and fungi are most efficient ubiquitous organism degrading cellulosic biomass by synthesizing cellulases. Tailoring through genetic manipulation has played a substantial role constructing novel fungal strains towards improved cellulase production desired traits. However, traditional methods time-consuming tedious. With availab...

The prokaryotic clusters of regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system utilizes genomically encoded CRISPR RNA (crRNA), derived from invading viruses and incorporated into ribonucleoprotein complexes with CRISPR-associated (CAS) proteins, to target and degrade viral DNA or RNA on subsequent infection. RNA is targeted by the CMR complex. In Sulfolobus solfataricus, this complex is...

BACKGROUND Multi-drug resistance (MDR) remains a significant obstacle to successful chemotherapy treatment for osteosarcoma patients. One of the central causes of MDR is the overexpression of the membrane bound drug transporter protein P-glycoprotein (P-gp), which is the protein product of the MDR gene ABCB1. Though several methods have been reported to reverse MDR in vitro and in vivo when com...

CRISPR (cluster of regularly interspaced palindromic repeats) is a prokaryotic adaptive defence system, providing immunity against mobile genetic elements such as viruses. Genomically encoded crRNA (CRISPR RNA) is used by Cas (CRISPR-associated) proteins to target and subsequently degrade nucleic acids of invading entities in a sequence-dependent manner. The process is known as 'interference'. ...

Differences in genomes underlie most organismal diversity, and aberrations in genomes underlie many disease states. With the growing knowledge of the genetic and pathogenic basis of human disease, development of safe and efficient platforms for genome and epigenome engineering will transform our ability to therapeutically target human diseases and also potentially engineer disease resistance. I...

Genome engineering using programmable nucleases enables homologous recombination (HR)-mediated gene knock-in. However, the labour used to construct targeting vectors containing homology arms and difficulties in inducing HR in some cell type and organisms represent technical hurdles for the application of HR-mediated knock-in technology. Here, we introduce an alternative strategy for gene knock-...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) remains a global health threat as chronic HBV infection may lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer. Current antiviral therapies with nucleoside analogues can inhibit the replication of HBV, but do not disrupt the already existing HBV covalently closed circular DNA. The newly developed CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR-associated 9...