GoKawiil
Tech News
Norwich-based Tropic has developed a gene-edited banana that resists browning for an extra day or two after peeling, using CRISPR-Cas9 to suppress three copies of the gene behind the polyphenol oxidase enzyme. CEO Gilad Gershon said the fruit is already grown in Latin America and has regulatory approval in 10 countries including Japan, Brazil and the Philippines, and is now nearing UK supermarket shelves.
Researchers, including Ying Zhang at Wuhan University and Shannon Miller at Scripps Research, are developing a range of genome-editing technologies that go beyond standard CRISPR-Cas9, some building on it and others operating independently. These newer methods are designed to insert or replace larger stretches of DNA, a task CRISPR-Cas9 struggles with, though the field remains in early stages.
Anthropic reported that its Claude AI model identified a previously undocumented enzyme system that structurally resembles the Cas9 protein used in CRISPR gene editing. The company acknowledged it cannot yet confirm what functions the newly flagged system actually performs.
Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital used CRISPR-Cas9 screening in mouse T cell models to identify ZMYND8 as a regulator of T cell exhaustion. Removing ZMYND8 boosted IL-2 signalling in antigen-specific CD8+ T cells, including those engineered with CAR constructs, helping the cells retain function against tumours in mouse models.
Researchers using engineered HCT116 cell lines with degradable cohesin components (RAD21, WAPL, CTCF) and SMARCAL1 showed that cohesin actively reorganizes chromatin contacts around replication forks. This reshaping helps slow down forks and promotes their reversal when replication stress occurs, linking genome organization machinery directly to DNA replication control.