"I lost concentration and began to think of our scholarly daughter working at Yale on a project called Zinc Fingers scanning a protein with pseudopods each with a trace of zinc that latch on to our DNA and help determine what we become."
--From Zinc Fingers, Peter Meinke
For some, the mention of zinc fingers fosters tasty images like ladyfinger- layered tiramisu or thin pieces of crispy fried chicken. For Meinke, zinc fingers are pure poetry. But only time and clinical tests will tell if zinc fingers, DNA-binding motifs with a zinc-ion core, can herald a new treatment for coronary and peripheral artery disease. A new drug, proposed by researchers at Sangamo Biosciences, Richmond, Calif., is just one of many potential applications of a new type of genetic engineering tool known as artificial zinc-finger protein transcription factors (TFsZF or ZFP TFs). These factors, with their unparalleled specificity, modu- larity, and ...
