Image credit: Sangharsh Lohakare (CC BY 4.0)
From muscles to nerves, our body is formed of many kinds of cells which can each respond slightly differently to the same harmful genetic changes. Understanding the exact relationship between mutations and cell-type specific function is essential to better grasp how conditions such as Parkinson’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis progress and can be treated.
Stem cells could be an important tool in that effort, as they can be directed to mature into many cell types in the laboratory. Yet it remains difficult to precisely introduce disease-relevant mutations in these cells.
To remove this obstacle, Li et al. focused on prime editing, a cutting-edge ‘search and replace’ approach which can introduce new genetic information into a specific DNA sequence. However, it was unclear whether this technique could be used to efficiently create stem cell models of human diseases.
A first set of experiments showed that prime editing is superior to conventional approaches when generating mutated genes in stem cells. Li et al. then further improved the efficiency and precision of the method by tweaking how prime editing components are delivered into the cells. The refined approach could be harnessed to quickly generate large numbers of stem cells carrying mutations associated with Parkinson’s disease; crucially, prime editing could then also be used to revert a mutated gene back to its healthy form.
The improved prime editing approach developed by Li et al. removes a major hurdle for scientists hoping to use stem cells to study genetic diseases. This could potentially help to unlock progress in how we understand and ultimately treat these conditions.
