Scientists apply optical pooled CRISPR screening to identify potential new Ebola drug targets

The following press release was issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Although outbreaks of Ebola virus are rare, the disease is severe and often fatal, with few treatment options. Rather than targeting the virus itself, one promising therapeutic approach would be to interrupt proteins in the human host cell that the virus relies upon. However, finding those regulators of viral infection using existing methods has been difficult and is especially challenging for the most dangerous viruses like Ebola that require stringent high-containment biosafety protocols. Now, researchers...