The Protein Man's Blog | A Discussion of Protein Research

The brain may be one of the most fascinating organs in the human body, and yet, we still haven’t fully unlocked its mysteries. However, with the advent of optogenetics, scientists now have a better chance of understanding how the brain works.

Genome editing used to be a long, laborious, and expensive process that, for quite a long time, you’d have been forgiven for thinking only worked on mice. In the earlier days, making a single genomic modification on a target organism could take a year or so and may have cost up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete. Thankfully, these limitations were addressed with the development of powerful alternative bioengineering technologies, namely ZFN, TALENs, and CRISPR.

With more than one million cases in 208 countries and territories around the world, the scientific and medical communities are on a race against time to find a viable prevention and treatment plan for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated disease, COVID-19, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives to date. This challenge has led them to focus on how the virus breaks into human cells.

How Does the Coronavirus Infect Target Cells?