A new bioinformatics tool, MHcut, developed by researchers in Kyoto, Japan, and Montreal, Canada, reveals that a natural repair system for DNA damage, microhomology-mediated end joining, is probably far more common in humans than originally assumed. Using MHcut and commercial genome-editing technology, the researchers created mutations in iPS cells with extraordinary precision to model diseases without the need of patient samples. This combination, which can be read about in Nature Communications, will make it much easier to study diseases even when patients are rare or unavailable.
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Source: Phys.org