Zinc finger nuclease articles from across Nature Portfolio

A strategy to control HIV-1 infection is to stably repress HIV-1 and induce “deep latency”. Here the authors show that a recombinant anti-HIV-1-1 protein can be packaged as mRNA into exosomes and delivered systemically to repress HIV-1-1 within the context of virus infected mice and achieve long term silencing of HIV-1-1 expression.

Engineered zinc finger nucleases achieve 98% knockout of a target gene in human T cells without detectable off-target activity.

Genome editing often requires cleavage within a narrow sequence window. Here the authors develop an expanded set of zinc finger nuclease architectures that increase the available configurations by a factor of 64 and can target almost every base at loci of therapeutic significance.

Advances in genome sequencing, editing and synthetic biology have enhanced the feasibility of large-scale genome engineering, termed genome writing. In this Opinion article, Chari and Church discuss the strengths and limitations of diverse strategies for genome writing, including extensively modifying existing genomes versus synthesizing genomesde novo, and they provide future visions for writing large genomes.

CRISPR–Cas9 has truly democratized genome editing. In this Perspective, Jin-Soo Kim discusses CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing in the context of earlier innovations using meganucleases, ZFNs and TALENs, which paved the way for the ongoing CRISPR–Cas revolution.

Programmable nucleases — including ZFNs, TALENs and RGENs derived from the prokaryotic CRISPR–Cas system — enable targeted high-precision genome engineering. This Review summarizes current knowledge of nuclease-specific features, individual pros and cons, and approaches to improve the efficiency of these enzymes to help researchers to choose the most appropriate tool for various genome editing experiments and applications.

Combining an inducible methyltransferase with a methylation-sensitive zinc finger creates an epigenetic memory circuit.

Zinc-finger DNA-binding domains are expressed on the surface of cells so that the cells can be tagged with fluorescently labeled oligonucleotides, enabling many possible applications in complex cell populations.

The Cas9 endonuclease is reprogrammed by RNAs for site-specific modification of eukaryotic and microbial genomes.