CRISPR: Beyond the Excitement

Excerpt

CRISPR/Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR-associated protein 9) is a new gene editing technology to add, remove, or modify an organism’s DNA sequence at a target location. Since its inception over a decade ago, CRISPR has raised worldwide excitement as a cheap, fast, and cost-effective DNA-editing approach. Its principle relies on the action of an RNA fragment (called guide) composed of about twenty sequences that bind to a target DNA sequence to guide an enzyme (called cutter) to remove, modify, or replace a target DNA sequence. The technique is inspired from a natural mechanism used by bacteria as a defence system against bacteriophages. CRISPR has become a fashionable approach in molecular biology and presented as to have many potential applications in life science, including plants, animals, and humankind research (Huang and Puchta 2021; Luo, Gilbert, and Ayliffe 2016; Schindele, Dorn, and Puchta 2020; Shrock and Güell 2017; Menchaca, et al. 2020; Taning, et al. 2017; Bassett and Liu 2014; Jabbar, et al. 2021; Leonova and Gainetdinov 2020; Strich and Chertow 2019; Chow and Chen 2018; Cruz and Freedman 2018). It even has been awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020.¹ …