Topic summary
TAL effector
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Transcription activator-like effector.
Engineering TAL effectors
This simple correspondence between amino acids in TAL effectors and DNA bases in their target sites makes them useful for protein engineering applications. Numerous groups have designed artificial TAL effectors capable of recognizing new DNA sequences in a variety of experimental systems. Such engineered TAL effectors have been used to create artificial transcription factors that can be used to target and activate or repress endogenous genes in tomato, Arabidopsis thaliana, and human cells.