Discovery and Engineering of a Rat Endogenous Retrovirus Reverse Transcriptase for Efficient Prime Editing.
Ma L, Yao P, Wu S, Shi Y, Qin L
Crispr
Crops edited with greater precision and efficiency could mean disease-resistant tomatoes, drought-tolerant wheat, or allergen-reduced peanuts reaching your garden center and table faster and with fewer off-target changes than current methods allow.
Prime editing is a newer, more precise version of CRISPR gene editing that works like a 'find and replace' tool for DNA — no cuts required. A key ingredient in this tool is an enzyme borrowed from viruses, and scientists just found a much better version of it hiding in rat DNA. By tweaking and optimizing this rat-derived enzyme, they made the whole editing system work nearly twice as well on tricky plant genes, which could speed up the development of improved crops.
Key Findings
Screened 558 reverse transcriptase candidates and identified 19 novel active ones; the rat-derived RERV-RT showed the highest activity of all.
The engineered variant enRERV-RT outperformed the standard M-MLV-RT-based prime editing system by 1.20-fold overall and 1.88-fold at hard-to-edit genomic loci in both mammalian and plant cells.
A new high-throughput evaluation platform called TRAP-seq-PE was developed to systematically benchmark prime editor performance across diverse mutation types.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists discovered a new reverse transcriptase enzyme from rats and engineered it to make CRISPR-based 'prime editing' significantly more efficient in both mammalian and plant cells, including at genomic sites that were previously difficult to edit.
Abstract Preview
CRISPR-based prime editors (PEs) install precise edits into genomic DNA without generating double-strand breaks. Their editing efficiency is highly dependent on reverse transcriptases (RTs), but ef...
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Crop-improvement refers to the systematic enhancement of plant varieties through selective breeding, genetic modification, and biotechnological approaches to develop cultivars with superior agronomic, nutritional, or environmental traits. This field is essential for addressing global food security,
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