Giving a Hand to Zinc Finger Transfection
Today’s TransMission is a SNiP (Small News in Pieces) about zinc fingers and the subtleties in zinc finger design. Zinc fingers are an alluring biotherapeutic modality because of their natural prevalence in humans, modularity, small size (~30 amino acids per finger) and DNA-targeting ability. However, zinc finger protein design remains challenging because DNA binding specificity and affinity is affected by the presence of adjacent zinc fingers in an unclear pattern.
Read today’s TransMission to learn how Ichikawa et al. applied machine learning in hopes of developing a proverbial ‘Zinc Finger Rosetta Stone’ for designing zinc fingers capable of targeting any genomic sequence.