The research team of Assistant Professor Satoru Iwata and Professor Takashi Iwamoto of Chubu University, in collaboration with the Aichi Devlopmental Medical Education Center, succeeded in the world's first chromosomal inversion genome editing experiment with extremely low damage to cells.
In recent years, it has become easier than before to produce genetically modified mice used for confirming the effects of new drugs.However, large-scale genome alterations such as chromosomal inversion (partial inversion of chromosomes) require yearly training and expensive equipment, and even experts need microinjection (microinjection), which takes about 3 hours to introduce reagents for genome editing. The injection) method is used.
Therefore, the research team tried to produce chromosomal inversion mice by the electroporation method, which requires relatively inexpensive equipment, training for 1 to 2 months, and work in about 15 minutes.The method can apply an electrical pulse to cells to introduce a genome editing reagent into a fertilized egg through a temporary gap.The gaps between the cells closed naturally and there was little damage, which was expected to improve the survival rate of fertilized eggs.
As a result of applying this method to mouse fertilized eggs produced by in vitro fertilization, the base pair inversion region was 1.5 times that of the conventional report in the mice that gave birth.Chromosome disease Mice require long chromosomal modifications, and the longer the modified region, the more types of disease models can be created.Furthermore, when the genome of each oviduct is edited by applying this method to a naturally fertilized egg in a mouse that does not require egg collection and transplantation, a mouse with an inverted region similar to that of the conventional one is born.This showed that it was also effective in modifying long gene regions at the chromosomal level in fertilized mouse eggs.
Since this method can be easily used even in small laboratories and undergraduate students with limited research budgets, it is expected that chromosome modification research will progress worldwide.In the future, it is expected that the onset mechanism of human chromosomal diseases will be elucidated and the development of diagnostic and therapeutic methods will be accelerated.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Simple and large-scale chromosomal engineering of mouse zygotes via in vitro and in vivo electroporation
