Brittney W. Thornton

This paper develops yeast-selected SpCas9 variants with re-specified PAM recognition to enable allele-specific editing, demonstrating improved specificity and catalytic efficiency compared to PAM-broadened variants.

Ymu1 TnpB unwinds DNA via a long-lived partially unwound intermediate before a rarely stable open state; the WFR triple variant stabilizes both, boosting plant editing.

Tobacco rattle virus delivery of engineered ISDra2 variant eTnpBc and its guide RNA as a single transcript achieves up to 90% somatic and 100% heritable editing in Nicotiana benthamiana.

This study identifies activating mutations in TnpB enzymes that enhance genome editing activity across multiple species.

The paper shows that engineered GeoCas9 variants enhance genome editing by accelerating DNA unwinding, revealing a new role for the WED domain in this process.