Influential inventions often combine existing tools in new ways. The iPhone, for instance, amalgamated the telephone, web browser and camera, among many other devices.

The same is now possible in gene editing. Rather than employ separate tools for editing genes and regulating their expression, these distinct goals can now be combined into a single tool that can simultaneously and independently address different genetic diseases in the same cell.

In a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers in the Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) describe minimal versatile genetic perturbation technology (mvGPT).