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📰 There are so many new incredible discoveries hitting the newswire every week. I want to start exploring a few of them with y’all each month. Today, let’s check out a newly discovered potential Anti CRISPR protein that blocks the efficacy of Cas13b – an RNA cutting member of the broad CRISPR family.



🔪Then, we’ll check out how three separate rock-star teams managed to develop an in vitro model that reconstitutes SPO11’s DNA-cutting ability. Wow, I guess this is just the ‘DNA Cutting Special` here at Clockwork.



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💻 Rendered using @BradyJohnston ‘s open-source Molecular Nodes Add-on for Blender: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/molecularnodes/



📚Read the papers I covered here:



⚡ New CRISPR-Cas13b Inhibitor:



AcrVIB1 inhibits CRISPR-Cas13b immunity by promoting unproductive crRNA binding accessible to RNase attack
Wandera, Katharina G. et al.
Molecular Cell, Volume 85, Issue 6, 1162 - 1175.e7
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2025.01.020



🗡SPO11 Goes In Vitro:
Paper from UC Louvain:
SPO11 dimers are sufficient to catalyse DNA double-strand breaks in vitro
Oger, C., Claeys Bouuaert, C. SPO11 dimers are sufficient to catalyse DNA double-strand breaks in vitro. Nature 639, 792–799 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08574-8



Paper from Sloan Kettering:
Reconstitution of SPO11-dependent double-strand break formation
Zheng, Z., Zheng, L., Arter, M. et al. Reconstitution of SPO11-dependent double-strand break formation. Nature 639, 784–791 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08601-2



Paper from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology:
In vitro reconstitution of meiotic DNA double-strand-break formation
Tang, X., Hu, Z., Ding, J. et al. In vitro reconstitution of meiotic DNA double-strand-break formation. Nature 639, 800–807 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08551-1



❗ Moving forward, I’ll be publishing just ONE fresh paper breakdown at a time. This video really should have been broken up into two separate parts. Let me know if y’all like this format or if we should keep things more in-depth here.



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