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Mangaluru: Scientists show how to make CRISPR easier

Two scientists of Indian origin have published an important piece of work in research related to the treatment of diseases such as cancer, diabetes or stroke.

The work of Dr Channabasavaiah B Gurumurthy and Rolen M Quadros was published in Genome Biology

Dr Channabasavaiah B Gurumurthy (Guru) from Davangere and Rolen M Quadros from Kundapur, currently work at the University of Nebraska medical centre, Omaha. They have achieved a breakthrough by developing what they call the Easi-CRISPR method, in collaboration with a team in Japan. The work was published in Genome Biology journal on May 17.

Dr Gurumurthy explained there are about 20,000 genes in humans that control body functions during health and during disease such as cancer, diabetes or stroke.

Laboratory mice also have similar set of genes, and by studying how genes work in mice, scientists develop treatments and diagnostics for human diseases.

“One way to understand how genes function, is by deleting individual genes from mice and observing how this gene-loss impacts them,” he said. In 2013, there was a groundbreaking technology called Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats CRISPR (pronounced Crisper) that scientists thought would expedite the process of creating mutant mice useful for disease research including cancer. In the past four years, scientists tried to use the CRISPR tool but were unsuccessful as the tool needed fine-tuning.

Dr Gurumurthy’s team used long single stranded DNAs as donor cassettes, unlike the double stranded DNA donors commonly used by the scientific community.

Dr Gurumurthy’s team first observed the robustness of their Easi-CRISPR platform in summer of 2016 and they posted their preliminary results at the preprint server BiorXiv, and started presenting their data at several conference.

Gurumurthy said several independent labs have already been able to reproduce Easi-CRISPR study’s results. “The mouse models developed should help scientists study how genes function and their mutations cause diseases. Genetically engineered mice have served as important tools for drug discovery and for developing newer treatments,” he said.

(File Picture of the family of  Rolen M Quadros of Kundapur - He is the Son of Ronald and Linet Quadros of Kundapur and the Son-in-law of Jerome and Anita Quadros of ex-Kemmannu, Now Mount Rosary, Kallianpur.)