BioCentury
ARTICLE | Preclinical News

CRISPR activation screen can identify functional lncRNAs

August 10, 2017 10:13 PM UTC

In a paper published in Nature, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard researchers and colleagues showed that a CRISPR-based activation screen could be used to identify and characterize long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that regulate the expression of other genes involved in disease.

In recent years, lncRNAs have increasingly been recognized as important epigenetic modulators of genes involved in a variety of diseases. Jeannie Lee at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of RaNA Therapeutics Inc., now Translate Bio (Cambridge, Mass.), believes the mechanisms, specificity and reversibility of lncRNAs position them as powerful therapeutic agents (see BioCentury Innovations, May 19, 2016)...