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A team of researchers from the Broad Institute, Harvard and Boston's Children's Hospital has developed a new way to improve the editing efficiency of base editors using a system called "phage assisted continuous evolution of base editors," or BE-PACE.
The development of the CRISPR gene editing system has led to the possibility of editing genes to prevent inherited diseases. But problems with the system have persisted—most notably, instances of the wrong genes being edited. Because of this, scientists are seeking ways to improve the accuracy of such systems to make them safe enough for use in human patients.
the team in Massachusetts has developed a system they call BE-PACE, which can be used to improve cytosine base editors (CBEs). The researchers used their system to evolve a CBE called evoAPOBEC1-BE4max. They report that testing showed it to be 26 times as efficient at editing cytosines (in the GC context) than prior systems, even as it maintained its efficiency in editing all other tested sequences. They further report that that testing of an evolved deaminase called evoFERNY showed it to be 29 percent smaller than APOBEC1.
The findings were published on the July 22 issue of Nature Biotechnology:
