Gillian Bates

Last month, I celebrated the appointment of Antonia Romeo as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. As the first woman to hold the role in its 100-year history, it felt genuinely monumental - proof that the highest office in the civil service is no longer out of reach. And yet, for the symbolism up top, the view inside government IT tells a different story; one that’s familiar across the tech ecosystem.

To dissect the mechanism underlying incomplete splicing in HD, we constructed a variety of mouse Htt minigenes. We chose to express these in a human cell line (human embryonic kidney fibroblasts—HEK293) (Fig. 1a) for a number of reasons. First, the mouse Htt sequences could be distinguished from endogenous human HTT.