Ahmed Mahas

1 month ago | biorxiv.org | Ahmed Mahas |Raphael Ferreira |Lisa Maria Riedmayr |George M Church

AbstractProgrammable technologies that sense specific nucleic acid signatures in living cells and trigger cellular functions hold significant potential for biotechnology and medicine. Here, we developed SONAR (Sensing Of Nucleic acids using ASOs and Reverse-transcriptases), a platform that enables the detection of target DNA and RNA sequences and triggers controlled gene expression in human cells.

Jul 8, 2024 | biorxiv.org | Ahmed Mahas |Emil Karpinski |George M Church

AbstractDNA plasmids are commonly used for delivering proteins and RNA in genome editing. However, their bacterial components can lead to inactivation, cell toxicity, and reduced efficiency compared to minicircle DNA (mcDNA) lacking such bacterial sequences. Existing commercial kits that recombine plasmids into mcDNA within proprietary bacterial strains are labor-intensive, yield inconsistent results, and often produce low-quality mcDNA.