Researchers continue to apply CRISPR to basic research questions, including identifying regulatory elements of disease-associated genes. In two papers published in Science this week (September 29), researchers at MIT, Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard described CRISPR interference and CRISPR/Cas9 noncoding genomic screening techniques. Both approaches “target what has been very difficult to do thus far—noncoding regions of the human genome in their native context in relation to important phenotypes,” Sriram Kosuri at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in either study, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
Examining the publication records of more than 28 million scientists between 1980 and 2013, information scientists from the University of Montreal and Leiden University in the Netherlands found that those who published their first paper in or after 2009 were more likely to have their publications among the top 1 percent of most-cited papers ...
