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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 10 2015, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly

Nature has a comprehensive analysis and history of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), the disruptive technique that is allowing genetic engineering and gene therapy to flourish:

CRISPR methodology is quickly eclipsing zinc finger nucleases and other [genetic] editing tools (see 'The rise of CRISPR'). For some, that means abandoning techniques they had taken years to perfect. "I'm depressed," says Bill Skarnes, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, "but I'm also excited." Skarnes had spent much of his career using a technology introduced in the mid-1980s: inserting DNA into embryonic stem cells and then using those cells to generate genetically modified mice. The technique became a laboratory workhorse, but it was also time-consuming and costly. CRISPR takes a fraction of the time, and Skarnes adopted the technique two years ago.

Researchers have traditionally relied heavily on model organisms such as mice and fruit flies, partly because they were the only species that came with a good tool kit for genetic manipulation. Now CRISPR is making it possible to edit genes in many more organisms. In April, for example, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported using CRISPR to study Candida albicans, a fungus that is particularly deadly in people with weakened immune systems, but had been difficult to genetically manipulate in the lab. Jennifer Doudna, a CRISPR pioneer at the University of California, Berkeley, is keeping a list of CRISPR-altered creatures. So far, she has three dozen entries, including disease-causing parasites called trypanosomes and yeasts used to make biofuels.

Yet the rapid progress has its drawbacks. "People just don't have the time to characterize some of the very basic parameters of the system," says Bo Huang, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco. "There is a mentality that as long as it works, we don't have to understand how or why it works." That means that researchers occasionally run up against glitches. Huang and his lab struggled for two months to adapt CRISPR for use in imaging studies. He suspects that the delay would have been shorter had more been known about how to optimize the design of guide RNAs, a basic but important nuance.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:57PM (#194759)

    I'm so jaded by biomed "breakthroughs" I just assume it is BS somehow. Always it's either they messed up the stats, weren't careful about making sure they measured the right thing, use some ridiculous dosages that have nothing to do with in vivo, etc. Is this a real thing worth looking into?

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:14AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:14AM (#194768) Journal

    Absolutely. You could start by reading the article [nature.com].

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  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:28AM

    by Hartree (195) on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:28AM (#194783)

    As Takyon said, this is the real thing. It's being widely used now in research labs and is much cheaper and more effective than the previous methods.

    That given, it's been adopted so quickly that, as the article says, we still need to do more research into the method itself and get it better characterized.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:26AM (#194864)

      we don't have to understand how or why it works

      I know this is supposed to sound like "wow some awesome mysterious thing". Same with your phrase "not fully characterized". I hear "misleading results due to experimental artifact just like every other time some biomed got hyped", but thanks I'll check it.