A bacterial immune system repurposed as a programmable gene-editing technology, using RNA-guided Cas proteins to cut or modify targeted DNA sequences.
A team led by microbiologist Joe Peters fused two unrelated bacterial proteins into a compact tool that inserts large DNA blocks at a chosen genome site. It works in bacteria, and the team is still hunting for relatives that work in human or plant cells.
Reality
University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
Reality
Two Science papers name the protein VIPR and show it silencing a reporter gene and blocking phage in E. coli, guided by an RNA that reads two DNA letters and skips the third, a targeting rule anyone borrowing it will have to design around.
Reality
The Stanford tool is less than half the size of comparable CRISPR activators by amino acid count, which is what lets one virus carry it along with the guides that aim it, and in injured mouse retinas it preserved partial vision.
Reality
A Nature paper reports promoter and CRISPR toolsets that transfer across distantly related gut Clostridia, then uses them to toggle two host-relevant metabolites in mice. The methods stay paywalled.
Reality