Meet NgAgo: Gene-Editing Similar to CRISPR and Other Tech Today

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Meet NgAgo: Gene-Editing Similar to CRISPR

CRISPR/Cas9 is the new-age gene-editing platform that revolutionized the biotechnology industry in recent times. And recently, we blogged about the first human trials using CRISPR to be held this year. Now, a new DNA-guided technique similar to CRISPR/Cas9 – called NgAgo, or Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, uses oligonucleotides to decode genomes.

Part of a research published in Nature Biotechnology, the technique was developed by Dr Han Chunyu & his fellow researchers at the Hebei University of Science and Technology. But recently, foreign scientists have called the technique a ‘failure’.

“I have found strictly NO EVIDENCE for a genome editing with NgAgo after multiple attempts with various settings and 3 different genes,” said Gaetan Burgio, Head of the Transgenesis Lab at Australian National University.

Study Shows Dogs Understand Human Language, Emotion

We may not realize it, but man’s best friend is not only loyal & caring; but understands human language and emotion as well. A new research has shown that dogs understand human language & emotion as they use the same brain regions used by humans.

"During speech processing, there is a well-known distribution of labor in the human brain. It is mainly the left hemisphere's job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere's job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning,” said Attila Andics, Lead Researcher of the Ethology Department at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

“Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms," he added, “This shows that dogs not only separate what we say from how we say it, but also that they can combine the two for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant.”

So, next time you’re talking in front of your dog or shouting orders to your beloved pet, make sure to keep in mind that emotions & tonality is very important to your pet’s survival in the urban wild.

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