By UCLA Health –
Our cells hold about two meters of DNA, folded and compacted to fit inside a nucleus far narrower than a strand of human hair. That packing is essential for life, but it creates a problem for scientists. Some of the genes that control a cell’s identity are buried so deep in tightly packed DNA that gene-targeting tools such as CRISPR activation, or CRISPRa, struggle to reach them.
That problem lies at the heart of cell reprogramming, which converts one type of cell into another. Scientists can turn a patient’s skin cells into neurons, heart cells or other hard-to-obtain cell types to study how a disease develops…
