WIKIMEDIA, CHANDRESThree recent papers chronicle researchers’ use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to create plants that are resistant to certain viruses. A team of scientists at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology this week (November 10) reported in Genome Biology its production of Nicotiana benthamiana resistant to the tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV).
“I believe that the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be extensively applied as a new weapon at a molecular level to protect plants from DNA viruses,” Jianwei Zhang of the University of Arizona and the Arizona Genomics Institute who was not involved in the work wrote in an email to The Scientist.
GENENTECH, ALVIN GOGINENI (VIA NIGMS)Two amyloid-β–targeting antibodies that failed to show benefit in clinical trials appear to disrupt neuronal function in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers from Technical University Munich, Germany, and their colleagues published in Nature Neuroscience this week (November 9).
The results suggest “that we don’t understand the antibody’s action, and this might go on in the human brain as well,” said study coauthor Marc Busche of Technical University Munich.
WIKIMEDIA, NIAIDThe blood-gut barrier helps keep most potentially harmful substances from reaching the bloodstream, but scientists at the European Institute of Oncology and their colleagues recently observed how some Salmonella break through this barricade in mice. The team’s results were published in Science this week (November 12).
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