• NYGC News – Spring 2020

  JANUARY 2020 – APRIL 2020 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS NYGC’s COVID-19 Research Activities In March and April, Tom Maniatis convened the first meetings for the COVID-19 Genomics Research Network, a new multi-institutional, multidisciplinary consortium that is undertaking a wide array of large-scale sequencing and analysis projects to advance our understanding of the deadly COVID-19 disease. Over 250 scientists and clinicians, representing the leading academic medical centers and research institutions across the region, are participating in these virtual meetings. NYGC core faculty members and senior scientists are also actively involved in developing joint collaborative projects within the Network, including a building a regional data commons to house de-identified clinical, omics, and imaging data for the research community. Tom, Sam Aparicio, PhD, Senior Scientific Director, Cancer Genomics, and Mike Zody, PhD, Scientific Director of Computational Biology, are serving as the lead NYGC representatives and are designing collaborative genomic studies; Sam Aparicio,  Mike Zody, and Charles Gagnon, Senior Director, IT Infrastructure, are working together to design the data commons; and Sam Fennessey, Scientific Project Manager, is overseeing all project management related to our work with this consortium. The Network will advance COVID-19 clinical knowledge and genomic research through: Viral genome sequencing: To understand how the virus…

• Massively parallel Cas13 screens reveal principles for guide RNA design.

  Hans-Hermann Wessels, Alejandro Méndez-Mancilla, Xinyi Guo, Mateusz Legut, Zharko Daniloski & Neville E. Sanjana.

• New Genetic Screening Platform Using CRISPR Technology for Targeting Thousands of Genes in a Massively-Parallel Fashion

  Accurate and fast method of finding best guides to detect, target, and knockdown specific RNA targets can be used to probe dark matter of the human genome and RNA viruses like coronavirus and flu CRISPR-based genetic screens have helped scientists identify genes that are key players in sickle-cell anemia, cancer immunotherapy, lung cancer metastasis, and many other diseases. However, these genetic screens are limited in scope: They can only edit or target DNA. For many regions of the human genome, targeting DNA may not be effective, and other organisms, such as RNA viruses like coronavirus or flu, cannot be targeted at all with existing DNA-targeting CRISPR screens. Now, in an important new resource for the scientific community published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers in the lab of Neville Sanjana, PhD, at the New York Genome Center and New York University have developed a new kind of CRISPR screen technology to target RNA. The researchers capitalized on a recently characterized CRISPR enzyme called Cas13 that targets RNA instead of DNA. Using Cas13, they engineered an optimized platform for massively-parallel genetic screens at the RNA level in human cells. This screening technology can be used to understand many aspects of RNA regulation and…