Sarcopenia is characterized by a degeneration of muscle mass and strength that incurs impaired mobility, posing grievous impacts on the quality of life and well-being of older adults worldwide. In 2018, a new international consensus was formulated to incorporate ultrasound imaging of the rectus femoris (RF) muscle for early sarcopenia assessment. Nonetheless, current clinical RF muscle identification and delineation procedures are manual, subjective, inaccurate, and challenging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a CRISPR-based multi-gene knockout screening system and toolkits for extensible assembly of barcoded high-order combinatorial guide RNA libraries en masse. We apply this system for systematically identifying not only pairwise but also three-way synergistic therapeutic target combinations and successfully validate double- and triple-combination regimens for suppression of cancer cell growth and protection against Parkinson's disease-associated toxicity. This system overcomes the practical challenges of experimenting on a large number of high-order genetic and drug combinations and can be applied to uncover the rare synergistic interactions between druggable targets.
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