Genome engineering may be the future of medicine, but it relies on evolutionary advances made billions of years ago in primordial bacteria, the original masters of gene editing.
Modern day genome engineers like Columbia's Sam Sternberg are always looking forward, modifying these ancient systems and pushing them to perform ever more complex feats of gene editing., it sometimes pays to look backward in time to understand how bacteria first created the original systems, and why., Sternberg and his postdoc, Chance Meers, Ph.D.
The transposon link soon led researchers to a treasure trove of potential new editing tools: thousands of ancient transposons that are still active in, each carrying an RNA-guided DNA nuclease that could potentially be programmed by genomic engineers—the human kind—to cut DNA. Meers also studied the problem from the perspective of the transposon, developing powerful assays that captured the jumping genes in the process of moving around the bacterial genome, hopping in and out of plasmids, and from one bacterial strain to another."Without that approach, you end up just studying the DNA scissors in isolation, preventing a holistic view that pieces the whole story together," Sternberg says.
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