Jan 28, 2021 10:10am Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that the gene editing tool TALEN is up to five times more efficient than CRISPR-Cas9 in parts of the genome called heterochromatin. (LionFive/Pixabay)
CRISPR-Cas9 has made waves in the biomedical world as a revolutionary gene editing tool, even garnering a 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. But it has its limitations.
A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) showed that another gene editing technique called TALEN is up to five times more efficient than CRISPR-Cas9 in a highly compact form of DNA called heterochromatin, according to results published in Nature Communications.
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IMAGE: In a study posted online Jan. 28 in the journal Science, University of Texas at Dallas researchers and their colleagues describe creating powerful, unipolar electrochemical yarn muscles that contract more. view more
Credit: University of Texas at Dallas
For more than 15 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas and their collaborators in the U.S., Australia, South Korea and China have fabricated artificial muscles by twisting and coiling carbon nanotube or polymer yarns. When thermally powered, these muscles actuate by contracting their length when heated and returning to their initial length when cooled. Such thermally driven artificial muscles, however, have limitations.
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IMAGE: On the left is a simulated image in which intracluster light is visible as a diffuse haze between discrete peaks of brightness the galaxies. In observations, as seen in. view more
Credit: Left image: Jesse Golden-Marx; simulation by The IllustrisTNG. Right image: Dark Energy Survey and Yuanyuan Zhang
A combination of observational data and sophisticated computer simulations have yielded advances in a field of astrophysics that has languished for half a century. The Dark Energy Survey, which is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has published a burst of new results on what s called intracluster light, or ICL, a faint type of light found inside galaxy clusters.
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IMAGE: University of Illinois researchers, including Gustavo Caetano-Anolles, say COVID-19 is likely to become seasonal after the initial pandemic is brought under control. view more
Credit: L. Brian Stauffer, University of Illinois
URBANA, Ill. - With cities around the globe locking down yet again amid soaring COVID-19 numbers, could seasonality be partially to blame? New research from the University of Illinois says yes.
In a paper published in
Evolutionary Bioinformatics, Illinois researchers show COVID-19 cases and mortality rates, among other epidemiological metrics, are significantly correlated with temperature and latitude across 221 countries. One conclusion is that the disease may be seasonal, like the flu. This is very relevant to what we should expect from now on after the vaccine controls these first waves of COVID-19, says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Geno