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China’s 7,000-year-old sunmao woodwork leads to world’s most efficient DNA editing tool
Quest to beat the US saw a Chinese team turn to ancient traditions, leading to a new technique 10 times more effective than other methods
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How to beat the United States in gene editing? A research team from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences had struggled with this question for three years, with no results.
Then they decided to draw inspiration from an ancient woodwork tradition and cut DNA like wood. It led to a gene-editing tool with unprecedented efficiency.
In the Chinese mortise-and-tenon joint technique known as sunmao, no nails or glue are used. Instead, a protruding “tenon” on one piece fits securely into a matching “mortise” on another, creating a solid interlocking structure.
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One of the earliest examples can be traced to China’s Hemudu culture in Zhejiang province around 7,000 years ago.
The new editing strategy achieves precise insertion and replacement efficiencies of up to 59.47 per cent in rice, surpassing those of existing mainstream tools.
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At certain genomic loci, which refer to the fixed physical locations of genes or other DNA sequences on a chromosome, its editing efficiency is 10 times higher than that of traditional Cas9-based systems.
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