This year, I participated in Science Olympiad, which is a high school competition testing science knowledge in a variety of fields. I, along with my friends Ayush and Andrew, competed in the Protein Modeling event. Our task was to create a physical model of a protein, and take an onsite test at the competition testing our knowledge of protein modeling software and the protein itself. The protein that we were given this year is called APOBEC3A, which is a type of cytidine deaminase.
Cytidine deaminase is a very interesting protein. It has the ability to turn a cytosine nucleotide into a uracil nucleotide. This ability caught the eyes of researchers, as they realized it could be used in gene editing. Cytidine deaminase succeeds where CRISPR-Cas9 fails-making specific, targeted, one base pair changes in the genome. Researchers were able to fuse cytidine deaminase and an inactive variant of Cas9 to do exactly that. This new mechanism is called base editing.
Base editing has a lot of implications for many fields in medical research. One of those fields is cancer research.