First progeria monkey model generated using base editor

摘要

In this issue, Wang et al. report on the generation of a nonhumanprimate model of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome(HGPS) using a base editor. Base editing is anemerging novel genome editing technique for modifying asingle base pair at specific sites in the genome. Base editors(BEs) have two principal components, a catalytically inactiveor single strand cleaving Cas-variant, which binds to theguide RNA and a nucleobase deaminase domain to convertspecific base pairs at the target loci (Komor et al., 2016;Nishida et al., 2016; Gaudelli et al., 2017). Cytosine baseeditor (CBE) and adenine base editor (ABE) are two baseeditors,which convert Cytosine-Guanine (C-G) to ThymineAdenine(T-A) and A-T to G-C, respectively. Likewise, RNAbase editor (RBE) was created by fusing nucleobasedeaminases with the Cas13 protein, which allows for a basesubstitution of A to inosine (I) or C to uracil (U) in the targetedRNA (Cox et al., 2017). Recently, a dual base editor wasdeveloped that can catalyze both cytosine and adenine baseconversions at the same time, broadening base editingcapability (Zhang et al., 2020).