Raphael Ferreira

Abstract Programmable technologies that sense nucleic acid signatures in living cells and trigger cellular functions hold promise for biotechnology and medicine. Here, we develop SONAR (Sensing Of Nucleic acids using ASOs and Reverse-transcriptases), a platform that detects target DNA and RNA sequences and triggers controlled gene expression in human cells.

Abstract Programmable technologies that sense specific nucleic acid signatures in living cells and trigger cellular functions hold significant potential for biotechnology and medicine. Here, we developed SONAR (Sensing Of Nucleic acids using ASOs and Reverse-transcriptases), a platform that enables the detection of target DNA and RNA sequences and triggers controlled gene expression in human cells.

Editor’s summary To date, our ability to functionally interrogate the consequences of structural variation in the human genome has been stymied by our inability to efficiently engineer one or many structural variants to study. Koeppel et al. and Pinglay et al. developed SCRaMbLE and Genome-Shuffle-seq, respectively, enabling the multiplex generation of thousands of structural variants in human and mouse genomes in a single experiment (see the Perspective by Seczynska and Steinmetz).