How CRISPR technology is advancing
Not too long ago, CRISPR was a cryptic acronym — or, to some ears, a drawer to keep lettuce fresh. Today, CRISPR Cas9, the most popular form of the powerful gene-editing technology, is widely used to accelerate experiments, grow pesticide-resistant crops, and design drugs to treat life-threatening genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia. But CRISPR is not perfect. Base editors (think of them as gene-editing pencils) can rewrite individual DNA letters. They home in on specific areas of DNA and swap out certain bases — A, C, T, or G — for others. But after the swap, base editors—like the cytosine base editor that converts C•G to T•A — perform unwanted off-target edits. Until now, even the best CRISPR tool, SpCas9, could only bind to about one in 16 locations along DNA, leaving many genetic mutations out of reach. Now, in two papers published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers at Harvard University, the...