Two new computational tools, MSMuTect and MSMutSig, could help reveal how often mutations in common DNA features called microsatellites appear in, and contribute to, cancer. Microsatellites — long stretches of short DNA repeats, such as TCGTCGTCG or ACACAC over and over — are common throughout the genome, both within and outside of genes. Researchers have linked…

A team of scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science at MIT, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has adapted a CRISPR protein that targets RNA (rather than DNA) as a rapid, inexpensive,…