Have you heard of CRISPR? It is not in fact a dating app for smartly-dressed people. Rather, it’s a new method of genetic engineering.
Actually, ‘new’ is putting it mildly. CRISPR is downright revolutionary and, whether for good or ill, it will change our world – and, quite possibly, ourselves too.
As you might imagine, editing genes is quite fiddly. We’re now pretty good at reading genetic sequences, but rewriting them is a whole other business. But what if Mother Nature were to crack the problem for us?
Well, it turns out she has. Bacteria contain distinctive sequences called ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’ or CRISPR for short. These CRISPR sequences mark out ‘spacer’ sequences of DNA originally acquired from bacteria-killing viruses called phages. The array of CRISPR and spacer sequences is then used to manufacture proteins which recognise and attack corresponding genetic sequences from invading phages.
Basically, the bacteria are using the CRISPR based system to ‘photograph’ the enemy’s DNA and then make little molecular robots that cut-up anything that matches the image.
By co-opting these mechanisms, genetic engineers have acquired an immensely more powerful toolkit than they had before (‘before’ being circa 2013). The biochemist Jennifer Doudna is one of the pioneers of this field and together with Samuel Sternberg she has written the definitive book on the subject so far – A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution.
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