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Seeing the light: integrating genome engineering with double-strand break repair

Nature Methods volume 8, pages 628–630 (2011)Cite this article

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The two-color traffic light reporter reads out what pathway is used to repair a DNA break and will increase insights into genome engineering.

Since the seminal discovery over 30 years ago that it is possible to generate stable cell lines2, genome engineering has become increasingly sophisticated. First came the development of transgenic animal technology and the harnessing of integrating viruses, such as retroviruses, to deliver transgenes to a wide variety of cell types in vitro and in vivo. The next major breakthrough was site-specific manipulation of the mammalian genome3,4. This made use of homologous recombination but was limited to mouse embryonic stem cells because its frequency was too low in other cell types to be practical.

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Figure 1: A reporter for DNA repair pathway choice.

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  1. Matthew Porteus is in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.,

    Matthew Porteus

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  1. Matthew Porteus
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Correspondence to Matthew Porteus.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Porteus, M. Seeing the light: integrating genome engineering with double-strand break repair. Nat Methods 8, 628–630 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1656

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