Genome engineering may be the future of medicine, but it relies on evolutionary advances made billions of years ago in primordial bacteria, the original masters of gene editing.
Modern day genome engineers like Columbia’s Sam Sternberg are always looking forward, modifying these ancient systems and pushing them to perform ever more complex feats of gene editing.
But to uncover new tools, it sometimes pays to look backward in time to understand how bacteria first created the original systems, and why.
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