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An Anti-CRISPR for Gene Editing

posted by janrinok on Thursday December 29 2016, @03:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-in-my-house dept.

Fnord666 writes:

Researchers have discovered a way to program cells to inhibit CRISPR-Cas9 activity. "Anti-CRISPR" proteins had previously been isolated from viruses that infect bacteria, but now University of Toronto and University of Massachusetts Medical School scientists report three families of proteins that turn off CRISPR systems specifically used for gene editing. The work, which appears December 15 in Cell, offers a new strategy to prevent CRISPR-Cas9 technology from making unwanted changes.

"Making CRISPR controllable allows you to have more layers of control on the system and to turn it on or off under certain conditions, such as where it works within a cell or at what point in time," says lead author Alan Davidson, a phage biologist and bacteriologist at the University of Toronto. "The three anti-CRISPR proteins we've isolated seem to bind to different parts of the Cas9, and there are surely more out there."


More information:
  Cell, Pawluk et al.: "Naturally occurring off-switches for CRISPR-Cas9" DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.11.017

takyon: Not a dupe of this related story, in case you were wondering.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Joe on Thursday December 29 2016, @02:46PM

    by Joe (2583) on Thursday December 29 2016, @02:46PM (#447081)

    A general off-switch could be useful if the proteins have a long half-life, but the currently available off-switches at the earlier levels (fine-tuning RNA stability or control of transcription with activators and repressors) combined with the ability to change protein stability (at the sequence level) means that these new proteins will have limited usefulness in this function.

    The much better use of these proteins would be for lowering off-target edits. These inhibitory proteins could be used to specifically raise the threshold of activity required to successfully edit at non-target regions. Localization of the inhibitors could be controlled with degenerate versions of the on-target gRNA sequence or through protein interaction domains.

    - Joe

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:17PM (#447109)

      I cliked links and no paper

  • (Score: 2) by Joe on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:54PM

    by Joe (2583) on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:54PM (#447127)

    An AC mentioned that the links didn't work, so I've provided some extra ones below.

    Sci-Hub has the pdf, but I'll avoid posting a direct link unless an editor can confirm that it is acceptable.

    - Joe

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27984730 [nih.gov]
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416315896 [sciencedirect.com]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @01:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @01:11AM (#450909)

      thanks Joe!