About the Research

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and UC San Francisco started working on a special variation of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR). This variation (CRISPRi) allows them to better study the human brain and the diseases it can suffer from.

The researcher’s findings from this study are available in the journal Neuron. This article explains how the technique uses CRISPRi gene alternations together with cells that are stem-cell-derived. Together both techniques improve our knowledge of brain disease as they help scientist delve deeper into neural changes.

This advancement in brain disease research lets scientists target the genes without damaging the cell membrane. Such damages to cells made research impossible until now.