Posts

Image
Blood stem cells in sickle cell disease and thalassaemia It looks like it will be possible to cure many inherited genetic disorders like sickle cell disease and thalassaemia within the next decade. It is possible to cure these diseases using gene therapy and genome editing technology which allow defective genes to be corrected in the bone marrow stem cells. These stem cells mature into all the different blood cell types.  Correcting a small number of these stem cells allows normal blood cells can be produced indefinitely. This is hugely powerful technology but one of the problems that has been highlighted in the early studies is that these patients stem cells take a long time to regrow after the have been corrected. We looked into this problem in the lab using an amazingly powerful new technology called single cell sequencing. This allow you to work out which genes are active in individual cells. Amazingly, you can use the techonology to look at tens of thousands of cells at the sa
Post a Comment
Read more

DNA origami: how do you fold a genome?

Image
Originally published on the WIMM blog   Inside each of the cells in your body is an entire instruction manual containing all the information required to build an entire human being. Yet it isn’t just the words in that manual that are important: you have to read the right chapters, and in the right order. To build one particular part of a human, sometimes the end of one paragraph will redirect you to a different part of the book – but how do cells get redirected to the right bit? Complicated interactions between different parts of the instruction manual (otherwise known as your DNA) underlie the fascinating complexity of the human body, but understanding when, where and how they occur remains a fundamental challenge in biological research. In this blog,  Marieke Oudelaar,  a DPhil student in  Jim Hughes’ lab  at the WIMM, describes  a new tool  developed in the Hughes lab that holds the promise to decipher this complex code. Our bodies are composed of trillions of cells. Each of th
Post a Comment
Read more