Smaller gene editors, Resilience’s cell-free antibody discovery platform and more

Two studies add to the growing universe of smaller gene editing enzymes: one by engineering an optimized, “hypercompact” version of Cas12f, and another by evolutionary mining of TnpB nucleases — an emerging family of transposon-encoded, RNA-guided DNA endonucleases believed to be ancestors of Cas12 and the recently identified eukaryotic gene editor Fanzor.

A University of Chicago team described in Nature Chemical Biology an engineered Cas12f variant that was 11.3-fold more potent than its parent protein, and one third of the size of the commonly used SpCas9 at about 422 amino acids. Structural studies of the optimized variant in complex with guide RNA and DNA showed it recognized and cleaved its target sequence in a dimerization-dependent manner...