A genetic editing system similar to CRISPR-Cas9 has been uncovered for the first time in eukaryotes – the group of organisms that include fungi, plants, and animals. The system, based on a protein called Fanzor, can be guided to precisely target and edit sections of DNA, and that could open up the possibility of its use as a human genome editing tool.
The research team, led by Professor Feng Zhang at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, began to suspect that Fanzor proteins might act as nucleases – enzymes that can chop up nucleic acids, like DNA – during a previous investigation.
They were looking into the origins of proteins like Cas9. This is the enzyme part of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. CRISPR (short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) sequences are the guide to particular regions of DNA, and Cas9 makes the cut. We hear a lot about CRISPR-Cas systems and their applications in medicine and biotechnology, but you may not be aware that they originate in bacteria, where they play a key role in immunity against viruses.
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