ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, JXFZSY
Ateam of Swiss scientists has engineered bacteria that are capable of making indelible DNA accounts of the most abundant RNAs the cells produce, according to a report in Nature earlier this month (October 3). The developers used the organisms in proof-of-principle experiments to record the cells’ transcriptional responses to both stress and a common herbicide.
“They’ve co-opted the natural way that the CRISPR system works—by storing information from nucleic acids that are invading hosts—[and used it] to capture events that are actually going on inside the cells,” says genomics researcher John Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the research. “It’s a clever application.”
The natural CRISPR-Cas system is a bacterial immune mechanism that inserts into the host genome short pieces of DNA (called spacers) cut from invading viruses. These DNA spacers—like dossiers of criminals on a most-wanted list—can later ...
