CRISPR genetic editing breakthrough: scientists abandoned viruses because they found it unnecessary

Many are already familiar with CRISPR/Cas9, a gene editing technology that has literally revolutionized biomedical research. New Atlas writes that although modified viruses have proven to be a very viable way to deliver materials to the cell nucleus to edit CRISPR/Cas9 genes, one problem remains.

Modified viruses are extremely expensive to work with, extremely difficult to scale, and can be toxic in the long run. Based on this, the scientists continued to work in this direction and finally managed to find a non-viral approach that seems to cope with its task better than the previous one.

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Note that CRISPR/Cas9 technology is borrowed and adapted from the natural genome editing system that bacteria use as an immune defense. In simple terms, when bacteria are attacked by a virus, they remove a small piece of the virus’s DNA and insert it into their DNA in a specific sequence known as the CRISPR sequence. This way the virus can be recognized later and destroyed if it tries to invade again.

Gene editing in humans relies on the enzyme Cas9, which cuts a piece of DNA under the guidance of CRISPR. The removed site can then be replaced with a similar but improved site through a process called repair. As a rule, scientists use modified viruses that do not cause disease.

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have developed a new non-virus-based technology in a new study. Another advantage was that this technology significantly improved homology-targeted repair as well as increasing the efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing capabilities.

The cleavage of two strands of DNA is known to be essential for cellular processes including replication and transcription, and inter-helix crosslinks (ICLs) are toxic DNA lesions that link these strands together. During the study, the scientists found that the damage caused by adding ICL to the repair template interestingly increased the likelihood of successful gene editing and stimulated cell repair.

According to study author Chris Richardson, he and his colleagues took this template DNA and damaged it. The researchers found that ICL improved gene editing efficiency by up to three times, and as the editing efficiency increased, the scientists expected to see an increase in the number of errors, but this did not happen—the scientists did not observe an increase in frequency. of mutations.

Researchers believe that new gene editing methods will be useful for developing more effective disease models in the laboratory and will open the door to more effective clinical and therapeutic interventions.

Previously Focus He wrote that CRISPR technology is close to beating incurable diseases.

Important! This article is based on and does not contradict the latest scientific and medical research. The text is for informational purposes only and does not contain medical advice. Be sure to see a doctor for a diagnosis.