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Scientists unveil tools for rewriting the code of life

MIT and Harvard researchers have developed technologies that could be used to rewrite the genetic code of a living cell, allowing them to make large-scale edits to the cell’s genome. Such technology...

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Materials research in the Information Age

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy — for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles — but today the development cycle is too slow: around 18 years...

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Seeing cancer in three dimensions

One of the hallmarks of cancer cells is that certain regions of their DNA tend to get duplicated many times, while others are deleted. Often those genetic alterations help the cells become more...

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Getting to the root of genetics

For Manolis Kellis, a deep interest in biology arose partly from an immersion in multiple languages. Kellis ’99, MEng ’99, PhD ’03, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer...

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Genetic 911: Cells’ emergency systems revealed

Toxic chemicals wreak havoc on cells, damaging DNA and other critical molecules. A new study from researchers at MIT and the University at Albany reveals how a molecular emergency-response system...

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Searching genomic data faster

In 2001, the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics announced that after 10 years of work at a cost of some $400 million, they had completed a draft sequence of the human genome. Today, sequencing a...

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Turning on key enzyme blocks tumor formation

Biologists found that boosting the activity of pyruvate kinase, the enzyme seen here, can prevent tumors from growing.Image: Dimitris Anastasiou, Will Israelsen and Andrea Howell Unlike ordinary cells,...

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Researchers identify biochemical functions for most of the human genome

Only about 1 percent of the human genome contains gene regions that code for proteins, raising the question of what the rest of the DNA is doing. Scientists have now begun to discover the answer: About...

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Evolution: It’s all in how you splice it

When genes were first discovered, the canonical view was that each gene encodes a unique protein. However, biologists later found that segments of genes can be combined in different ways, giving rise...

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Editing the genome with high precision

Researchers at MIT, the Broad Institute and Rockefeller University have developed a new technique for precisely altering the genomes of living cells by adding or deleting genes. The researchers say the...

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Cardiac development needs more than protein-coding genes

When the human genome was sequenced, biologists were surprised to find that very little of the genome — less than 3 percent — corresponds to protein-coding genes. What, they wondered, was all the rest...

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Reading DNA, backward and forward

MIT biologists have discovered a mechanism that allows cells to read their own DNA in the correct direction and prevents them from copying most of the so-called “junk DNA” that makes up long stretches...

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Research update: Genome editing becomes more accurate

Earlier this year, MIT researchers developed a way to easily and efficiently edit the genomes of living cells. Now, the researchers have discovered key factors that influence the accuracy of the...

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Controlling genes with light

Although human cells have an estimated 20,000 genes, only a fraction of those are turned on at any given time, depending on the cell’s needs — which can change by the minute or hour. To find out what...

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Speeding up gene discovery

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, which identified nearly 20,000 protein-coding genes, scientists have been trying to decipher the roles of those genes. A new approach developed at MIT,...

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Unusual suspects

DNA stores the information of life, proteins provide the action, and in between sits elusive RNA, which serves both as a database of information and as a molecular machine. RNA is more flexible than...

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Research reveals structure of key CRISPR complex

Researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute have teamed up with colleagues from the University of Tokyo to form the first high-definition picture of the Cas9 complex — a key part of the CRISPR-Cas...

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Broad Institute awarded first patent for CRISPR-Cas9 system

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard recently announced that it has been issued a patent for a CRISPR-Cas9 system that's enabling scientists to modify genes and better understand the biology of...

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It’s in the genes — but whose?

In 2003, when the human genome had been sequenced, many people expected a welter of new therapies to follow, as biologists identified the genes associated with particular diseases.But the process that...

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Kellis to lead MIT team in new phase of GTEx project to elucidate basis of...

The National Institutes of Health have awarded eight grants as part of a new phase of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project to study the role that genomic variation plays in modulating gene...

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