The use of new drugs and biomarkers and, more importantly, that these develop much faster, could be possible thanks to a new technology developed by scientists from the universities of Trento and Harvard.
This is called LASSO cloning , a technique that can be used to isolate thousands of long DNA sequences at the same time, faster than has ever been achieved. The new technology accelerates the creation of proteins , the end products of genes, and is likely to lead to much faster discovery of new drugs to treat dozens of diseases.
In a report published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering , the researchers describe the technique as a new molecular approach to simultaneously clone and express thousands of protein-coding DNA sequences in a single reaction. Until now, cloning of DNA expressing its protein had been achieved only from one gene at a time.
The LASSO probe is described as a new type of captured DNA strand. Collections of these LASSO probes can be used to capture desired DNA sequences . It’s like imagining a rope loop capturing a field animal, but in this case, it would capture thousands at a time in one effort. These sequences are captured in a way that allows scientists to analyze what proteins in genes do.
“Our goal is to make cloning and expressing the complete set of proteins from any organism cheap and easy for any researcher in any field,” says Ben Larman, assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co. -author of the study.
In the research, LASSO probes were used to simultaneously capture more than 3,000 DNA fragments from the E. coli bacterial genome. The team successfully captured at least 75% of the genetic targets. The new technique is an improvement on an older method called molecular imprinting (MIPs), which is capable of capturing only about 200 bases of DNA.
“We are very excited about all the potential cloning applications that LASSO can have,” says Larman. “Our hope is that by expanding the number of proteins that can be expressed and examined in parallel, we will pave the way for new therapeutic biomolecules for many diseases.”
