© BRYAN SATALINOMost DNA does not code for proteins. And figuring out how, when, and where this genomic “dark matter” plays a role in gene regulation is a huge undertaking. Now, scientists have developed a tool that could help. In a paper published today (April 3) in Nature Biotechnology, a team from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, describes a high-throughput screening technique that uses CRISPR-Cas9 epigenome editing to identify regulatory elements in the genomes of human cells.
“It turns out that most of the genetic variation that’s responsible for more common complex diseases—like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and neurological disorders—actually happens in this region in between genes,” said coauthor Charles Gersbach of Duke. “The exciting thing is having methods available to annotate the function of the noncoding genome,” he added.
“The noncoding genome is vast, and it can be challenging to identify which regions are important for modulating protein-coding genes,” Neville Sanjana of New York University, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist. This study “harnesses CRISPR pooled screening technology to help us figure out where the functional regions in the noncoding genome [are],” he explained.
Gersbach and colleagues created lentiviral libraries of guide RNAs to ...
