Jennifer A. Doudna

Circulating cholesterol fuels SARS-CoV-2 replication via ORF3a.

High levels of "bad" cholesterol increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and are also linked to more severe COVID-19, though the reason has been unclear. We show that low-density lipoprotein (LDL) directly enhances SARS-CoV-2 RNA replication, especially in the Beta variant. The viral accessory protein ORF3a is both...

VIPR RNA-guided DNA recognition by noncontiguous geometric triplex formation.

A noncontiguous code for RNA-guided DNA recognition at the origin of CRISPR-Cas.

The discovery of Viral Interference Programmable Repeat systems consisting of a Vipr protein ancestral to the earliest CRISPR-Cas effectors and VIPR RNAs (vrRNAs) comprising alternating GGY/NN motifs suggests that adaptive immunity originated from ancient warfare between viruses.

Improving RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Through Expanded Training Data.

A large and diverse dataset comprising paired RNA sequences and their corresponding secondary structures is developed, and SincFold exhibited improved performance on a set of previously unseen RNA families, enhancing its capability to predict accurate de novo RNA secondary structures.

Intelligent Drone Swarm Coordination for Precision Farming and Disaster Response

This study explores how reliable intelligent drone swarms are utilized as a single efficient bi-functional agent for precision agriculture and disaster relief support. Even though autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) change individual sectors, traditional systems with one agent face limits in operational scale, b...

Structure and evolution-guided design of minimal RNA-guided nucleases

A protein design strategy is used that couples a structure-guided inverse-folding model with evolution-informed residue constraints to generate active, divergent variants of TnpB, a minimal CRISPR-Cas12-like nuclease, termed SynTnpBs, establishing a strategy for creating non-natural RNA-guided nucleases and conformatio...

Reprogramming Cas9 PAM Recognition for Allele-Specific Editing

A yeast selection platform is developed to engineer Cas9 with re-specified activity across multiple additional non-canonical PAMs in yeast, further demonstrating its utility as a general and programmable framework for expanding the therapeutic reach of precision genome editing.

Virus-like particles enable targeted gene engineering and pooled CRISPR screening in primary human myeloid cells.

A virus-like particle (VLP)-based toolkit that delivers diverse CRISPR editing modalities to human monocytes, macrophages and dendritic cells with high efficiency while preserving viability and innate immune responsiveness is presented.