For the first time, researchers have fused two mouse chromosomes together in vitro, resulting in living mice with new karyotypes. The new technique, detailed in a study published today (August 25) in Science, can help study chromosomal evolution and may also aid research into the detrimental health effects of chromosomal fusions in humans, experts say.
“[The researchers] now have this beautiful toolkit. . . they can do a lot of really clever CRISPR engineering,” Harmit Malik, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist. “It’s a tour de force . . . a lot of the questions that we thought were not possible to address in a genetically tractable way are now completely genetically tractable.”
Most species have a fixed number of chromosomes, the tightly coiled, threadlike structures that organize and segregate a cell’s DNA during cell ...
