Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Emory Integrated Core Facilities

For genetically altered mice/rats, freeze and recharge

With a pandemic threatening the health and safety of Emory researchers in March 2020, university leadership made the difficult decision to ramp down some types of research. For investigators that use laboratory mice or rats in their research, this posed a significant challenge.

How could investigators maintain valuable, often unique, lines of genetically engineered animals for future research? The Mouse Transgenic and Gene Targeting Core (TMF) had a solution: cryopreservation. Animals’ sperm — and occasionally, embryos – can be carefully preserved in cold-resistant straws and stored in liquid nitrogen.

“Cryopreservation is a reliable and efficient method for archiving and distributing genetically engineered mouse lines,” says Karolina Piotrowska-Nitsche, PhD, director of the Core.

The TMF is located on the ground floor of the Emory Health Sciences Research Building and provides a suite of services related to transgenics and gene editing, working with tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 to make subtle or complex changes in the DNA of living animals.

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Manipulating mouse genes to order, CRISPR or old-school

Just a follow-up to last week’s announcement from the Emory Transgenic Mouse and Gene Targeting core that they are offering CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing for mice. Using CRISPR/Cas9 to produce genetically altered mice is a

Knockout_mice

Gene targeting – the 20th century way

substantial advance over the old way of doing knockouts and other manipulations (which itself won a Nobel Prize in 2007), mainly because it’s faster and easier.

To appreciate the difference, consider that the old way involves introducing DNA into mouse embryonic stem cells, and then selecting for the rare cells that take up and incorporate the DNA in the right way. Then the ES cells have to be injected into a blastocyst, followed by mouse breeding to “go germline.”

With CRISPR/Cas9, it’s possible to inject pieces of RNA that target the desired genetic changes, straight into a one-cell stage mouse embryo. Not every embryo has all the right changes, but the frequency is high enough to inject and screen. As this review explains, it’s possible to introduce mutations into three genes at once and get mice quickly, rather than make each one separately and then breed the mice together, which can take many months.

Also, because of the need for drug selection, the targeting construct in old-school gene targeting has to be a blunt instrument. That can make it hard to make subtle changes to a gene — like introduce point mutations corresponding to natural variations linked with human disease — without taking a sledgehammer to the entire gene locus. CRISPR/Cas9 takes care of that problem.

Despite the advantages of this technology, three things to keep in mind:

*Many genetically altered mice are already available “off the shelf” as part of the International Knockout Mouse/Mouse Phenotyping Consortium.

*Emory’s Mouse Core has been working with the company Ingenious Gene Targeting, and has been out-sourcing some of the tedious aspects of old-school gene targeting in mice to Ingenious, starting last year. Technicians there can generate a dazzling array of conditional knockouts. If you want your favorite gene to flip around and produce a fluorescent protein when you give the mice an antibiotic, but only in some cells — Ingenious can do that. Old school is actually still the way to go for fancy stuff like this.

*Jackson Labs in Maine also works with Emory, offering similar services, and offers a guarantee. Read more

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Proteomics making fantastic routine

Much of basic biomedical research concerns proteins. The enzymes that keep cells running, the regulators and receptors that control what our cells do, the antibodies that defend us against invaders — all of these are proteins.

That means every day, scientists are asking questions like:

What’s happening to my favorite protein? Is there more or less of it in this sample? What other proteins work with it or stick to it?

That’s where a proteomics core facility comes in. Given a mixture of hundreds or even thousands of proteins, proteomics specialists can separate, identify and quantify them.Proteomics1smaller

Researchers in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, cancer metabolism, schizophrenia and vaccines all make use of Emory’s proteomics core facility. It was key to the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s 2013 discovery of a new form of Alzheimer’s disease protein pathology.

Director Nick Seyfried reports that the core has acquired close to $3 million in sophisticated mass spectrometry equipment in the last few years. The Emory Integrated Proteomics Core, one of the Emory Integrated Core Facilities, is supported in part by the Winship Cancer Institute, the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and a recently renewed grant for ENNCF (Emory Neurosciences NINDS Core Facilities).

Protein mass spectrometry is like Wonkavision

There’s a scene in both the 1971 and 2005 film adaptations of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which a chocolate bar is separated into millions of tiny pieces and sent flying across a clean room. Protein mass spectrometry resembles the first part of this process. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment