CRISPR

The current innovations being made in genetic engineering are possibly some of the most fascinating, and life changing in any scientific field today. I will be going over just a few of them in this post but there are many more out there; the first innovation that is Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR.

            I will be talking about more specifically CRISPR-Cas9, while in modern genetic engineering researchers have made many strive most importantly mapping the entire human genome. The major obstacle scientists ran into was no having an efficient way to edit genes, and that’s where CRISPR has become revolutionary. CRISPR-Cas9 as we know it today was created by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier who simplified the process by fusing together two molecules of RNA into one. CRISPR’s roots can however be traced all the way back to the late 1980s when Yoshikizumi Ishino discovered cluster DNA repeats when he accidentally cloned part of a CRISPR together with the target gene (NCBI).

 CRISPR uses a human made molecule that contains the Cas9 nucleus protein, to which the programmable guide RNA is then set to the desired gene to be edited. CRISPR basically repurposed a process scientists had known for a while, in which your immune systems find certain gene from virus to eradicate them, researchers using the aforementioned tool used this process to easily manipulate specific genes. This technology allows a much-needed ease of use and affordability to the gene editing processes.  With CRISPR scientists can now edit genes with accuracy, speed, and precision that they never could before. Now genes can be edited, deleted, and mutated in a relatively short time, and in a much more affective way. Before CRISPR any changes to a genome would have to be tailor made to the section of DNA the specific kind of cells and the organism, all of which would take years and millions of dollars. With CRISPR sparing a few details all that needs to be changed is the guide RNA, then it can be used as desired. Because of this comparable noncomplex nature of CRISPR, it can have many different applications; such as gene editing simply put the copy and/or pasting of genes, RNA editing, and knockdown or activations the activations or suppression a particular gene.

Even with all of these applications CRISPR is still a fairly new technology and has much more research to be done. The inventors of CRISPR have urged researcher around the world to avoid using CRISPR in human clinical trials due to the need for further analysis. As recently as April of 2015 Chinese scientist attempted to modify the DNA of a non-viable human embryo in an attempt to amend a segment that attributed to specific genetic blood disorder belonging under the group of disorders known as Thalassemia a subgroup of anemia disorders. The result this experiment proved the aforementioned warnings, as the trial only produced changes to some of the genes and had off-target effects on others (Nature).  Although as of now the technologies like CRISPR are not ready for medical trials, it is not too soon to be speculating on the future impacts this and other technologies surrounding genetic engineering will have on humanity; next week I will be covering these future possibilities.

NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC213968/

Nature

http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378