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Category: bioengineering

Scientists Invent Plastic That Nature Eats 2,800 Feet Underwater

Scientists have unveiled a new biodegradable plastic that vanishes in one of the harshest environments on Earth—the deep sea.

In an experiment nearly 3,000 feet underwater, a bioengineered material called LAHB broke down while conventional plastics stayed intact. Deep-sea microbes not only colonized the plastic’s surface, but actively digested it using specialized enzymes, turning it into harmless byproducts. This breakthrough suggests a promising solution to the global plastic crisis, especially in oceans where most waste lingers for decades or centuries.

Global plastic waste problem still looms.

New Study Suggests Cancer Drug Could Be Used to Target Protein Connection That Spurs Parkinson’s Disease

In studies with genetically engineered mice, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have identified a potentially new biological target involving Aplp1, a cell surface protein that drives the spread of Parkinson’s disease-causing alpha-synuclein.

The findings, published May 31 2024 in Nature Communications, reveal how Aplp1 connects with Lag3, another cell surface receptor, in a key part of a process that helps spread harmful alpha-synuclein proteins to brain cells. Those protein buildups are hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease.

Notably, the researchers say, Lag3 is already the target of a combination cancer drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that uses antibodies to “teach” the human immune system what to seek and destroy.

Equipping living cells with logic gates to fight cancer

One of the most exciting developments in cancer treatment is a wave of new cell therapies that train a patient’s immune system to attack cancer cells. Such therapies have saved the lives of patients with certain aggressive cancers and few other options. Most of these therapies work by teaching immune cells to recognize and attack specific proteins on the surface of cancer cells.

Unfortunately, most proteins found on cancer cells aren’t unique to tumors. They’re also often present on healthy cells, making it difficult to target cancer aggressively without triggering dangerous attacks on other tissue. The problem has limited the application of cell therapies to a small subset of cancers.

Now Senti Bio is working to create smarter cell therapies using synthetic biology. The company, which was founded by former MIT faculty member and current MIT Research Associate Tim Lu ’03, MEng ’03, PhD ’08 and Professor James Collins, is equipping cells with gene circuits that allow the cells to sense and respond to their environments.

Founded by MIT researchers, Senti Bio is is working to create smarter cell therapies for cancer using synthetic biology. The company equips cells with gene circuits that allow the cells to respond to their environments.

A Boost for the Precision of Genome Editing

The FDA’s recent approval of the first CRISPR-Cas9–based gene therapy has marked a major milestone in biomedicine, validating genome editing as a promising treatment strategy for disorders like sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, and certain cancers.

CRISPR-Cas9, often likened to “molecular scissors,” allows scientists to cut DNA at targeted sites to snip, repair, or replace genes. But despite its power, Cas9 poses a critical safety risk: the active enzyme can linger in cells and cause unintended DNA breaks—so-called off-target effects—which may trigger harmful mutations in healthy genes.

Now, researchers in the labs of Professor Ronald T. Raines (MIT Department of Chemistry) and Professor Amit Choudhary (Harvard Medical School) have engineered a precise way to turn Cas9 off after its job is done—significantly reducing off-target effects and improving the clinical safety of gene editing. Their findings are detailed in a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Researchers used cells that glow green due to a green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene. If Cas9 is working, it disrupts the GFP gene and the cells stop glowing. If LFN-Acr blocks Cas9, the cells keep glowing. These images depict cells in different conditions: some with active Cas9 (which stopped the green glow), some with Cas9 and LFN-Acr (glow stayed on).

Image courtesy of the researchers.

DNA nanostructures can mimic molecular organization of living systems without chemical cross-linking

Newly developed DNA nanostructures can form flexible, fluid, and stimuli-responsive condensates without relying on chemical cross-linking, report researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo and Chuo University, in the journal JACS Au.

Owing to a rigid tetrahedral motif that binds the linkers in a specific direction, the resulting string-like structures form condensates with exceptional fluidity and stability. These findings pave the way for adaptive soft materials with potential applications in drug delivery, artificial organelles, and bioengineering platforms.

Within living cells, certain biomolecules can organize themselves into specialized compartments called biomolecular condensates. These droplet-like structures play crucial roles in cellular functions, such as regulating and ; they essentially represent nature’s clever way of organizing cellular activity without the need for rigid membranes.

CRISPR-GPT Turns Novice Scientists into Gene Editing Experts

CRISPR technology has revolutionized biology, largely because of its simplicity compared to previous gene editing techniques. However, it still takes weeks to learn, design, perform, and analyze CRISPR experiments; first-time CRISPR users often end up with low editing efficiencies and even experts can make costly mistakes.

In a new study, researchers from Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley, teamed up with Google DeepMind to create CRISPR-GPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can guide researchers through every aspect of CRISPR editing from start to finish in as little as one day.1 The results, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, demonstrate that researchers with no previous CRISPR experience could achieve up to 90 percent efficiency in their first shot at gene editing using the tool.

CRISPR-GPT is a large language model (LLM), a type of AI model that uses text-based input data. Led by Le Cong of Stanford University and Mengdi Wang of Princeton University, the team trained the model on over a decade of expert discussions, as well as established protocols and peer-reviewed literature. They designed it to cover gene knockout, base editing, prime editing, and epigenetic editing systems, and benchmarked the tool against almost 300 test questions and answers.

First gene-edited islet transplant in a human passes functional trial

Uppsala University Hospital-led investigators report that gene-edited donor islet cells survived 12 weeks inside a man with long-standing type 1 diabetes without any immunosuppressive medication.

Intensive insulin therapy can delay complications and improve life expectancy. Early-onset type 1 diabetes remains linked to reduced quality of life, serious cardiovascular risk, and shortened lifespan. Toxicity from lifelong immune suppression also drives morbidity and mortality in organ recipients.

In the study, “Survival of Transplanted Allogeneic Beta Cells with No Immunosuppression,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers conducted a first-in-human open-label trial to test whether hypoimmune-engineered islet cells could evade rejection.

Chinese Scientists Unveil Major Breakthrough in Large-scale DNA Editing

Chinese scientists have developed a gene editing technology capable of precisely manipulating large DNA segments ranging from thousands to millions of base pairs in both plant and animal cells, marking a significant advance in the field of life sciences.

The research team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced the new technology in a study published online Monday in the journal Cell.

The method, called PCE (Programmable Chromosomal Engineering), combines three innovative techniques to enable programmable editing of large chromosome segments. In lab tests, researchers successfully inserted an 18,800-base-pair DNA fragment, replaced a 5,000-base-pair sequence, inverted a 12-million-base-pair chromosomal region, deleted a 4-million-base-pair segment, and even relocated entire chromosomes.

Scientists just cracked the code to editing entire chromosomes flawlessly

A group of Chinese scientists has created powerful new tools that allow them to edit large chunks of DNA with incredible accuracy—and without leaving any trace. Using a mix of advanced protein design, AI, and clever genetic tweaks, they’ve overcome major limitations in older gene editing methods. These tools can flip, remove, or insert massive pieces of genetic code in both plants and animals. To prove it works, they engineered rice that’s resistant to herbicides by flipping a huge section of its DNA—something that was nearly impossible before.

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