December 20, 2017
An early experiment demonstrates the shutting down of a faulty gene by Lydia Denworth
When David Liu first heard about a strain of mouse from his colleague Zheng-Yi Chen, he got excited. The mice carry a gene, TMC1, with a mutation that leads to deafness over time, giving them the name Beethoven mice. Their mutation matches one in humans that produces the same effect. The mutation is dominant; if it is present, hearing loss is certain.
Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute, works with the noted CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which targets and changes precise stretches of DNA. Read More
