Genetic Engineering Publications - GEG Tech top picks

EMBL scientists have developed a new variant of the Sleeping Beauty transposase which could be used for genome engineering of stem cells and therapeutic T cells. As such it is extremely valuable for use in regenerative medicine and cancer immunotherapy. The underlying genome engineering procedures will in the future also reduce costs and improve the safety of genome modifications.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0291-z

Sleeping Beauty (SB) is the first synthetic DNA transposon that was shown to be active in a wide variety of species. Here, the authors review studies from the last two decades addressing both basic biology and applications of this transposon. They discuss how host–transposon interaction modulates transposition at different steps of the transposition reaction. They also discuss how the transposon was translated for gene delivery and gene discovery purposes. They critically review the system in clinical, pre-clinical and non-clinical settings as a non-viral gene delivery tool in comparison with viral technologies.

Juan Cadinanos and colleagues perform an insertional mutagenesis screen with a single-copy inactivating Sleeping Beauty transposon to look for Pten-cooperating tumor suppressor genes in mice. They find novel candidate cancer genes, verify their clinical relevance in patient cohorts and functionally demonstrate their synergistic relationship to Pten in tumor suppression.