With a switch of a letter in DNA ‘dark matter,’ Israeli scientists change sex of mouse

(Worthy Insights) – In a world first, scientists at Bar-Ilan University say they have discovered that a single-letter switch in a region of the genome once dismissed as “junk DNA” can reverse the biological sex of a mouse.

“If you change just one letter in the DNA in a place that doesn’t create proteins, and does not encode for anything, you can prevent the ability to create an ovary, and instead you will get development of testes,” said principal investigator Dr. Nitzan Gonen from the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences and Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, in a recent video call with The Times of Israel. “This is why it’s super exciting.”

Using CRISPR technology, a gene-editing tool, the scientists changed “just one DNA letter out of about 2.8 billion,” Gonen said. “I was completely surprised to find that XX mice, which genetically should have been female, developed instead as males with full testes and male genitalia.” [ Source (Read More…) ]


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