In STAT Madness, CRISPR tools to treat brain disorders capture Editors’ Pick
The 2019 #STATMadness Editors' Pick is the @WhiteheadInst's research on using a new form of #CRISPR to develop treatments for brain disorders such as fragile X.
The identities of the inventors of the hammer are lost to history, but we suspect that once they had their first working model, they quickly started bashing stuff. In 2016, biologist Shawn Liu felt the same way.
He and colleagues at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., had just invented a form of CRISPR-Cas9 that, unlike the original genome editing tool, leaves DNA’s “letters” alone but adds or removes genetic silencers — turning gene expression off or on. (A few other teams came up with the same idea for “epigenetic editing” almost simultaneously.)
Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in
