Metagenomic Breakthrough Unlovers New Retron Systems for Enhanced Gene Editing
Scientists have identified over 500 new retron systems through metagenomic analysis, with several showing dramatically improved gene editing capabilities. The most promising retron demonstrated tenfold higher efficiency than previous standards while maintaining high specificity.
Metagenomic Mining Reveals Novel Retron Systems
Researchers have reportedly discovered a vast array of previously unknown retron reverse transcriptases through comprehensive metagenomic analysis, according to a recent Nature Biotechnology publication. The study states that scientists developed a specialized bioinformatics pipeline to identify retron-RTs from bacterial and archaeal genomes, including approximately 2 million partially assembled bacterial genomes from the human microbiome. This approach led to the identification of more than 500 high-confidence, nonredundant retrons with well-annotated msr-msd sequences, which were subsequently classified into 11 distinct phylogenetic clades.