© Yujun Song/Nanjing University
Engineers are making their mark on biotech's hottest commodity.
Chinese scientists today reported that they can control the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 with light.
The method replaces the use of viruses traditionally used to deliver CRISPR gene editing machinery, and gives scientists temporal control over the tool, the researchers said. They published their
findings in the journal
Science Advances.
The technique has the potential to precisely target and kill cancer cells, says Yujun Song, an author of the paper and a professor in the
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Nanjing University in China.
CRISPR-short for Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeats, is a genetic phenomenon found in microbes that scientists have
turned into a DNA chopping machine. When combined with certain proteins, typically one called Cas9, the biological complex can cut and paste DNA, altering life's genetic code.
Physically delivering CRISPR-Cas9 into a cell typically requires hitching the complex to a virus. The virus invades the nucleus of the target cell, delivering the CRISPR cut-and-paste machinery. The strategy works, but using viruses as a delivery method can cause problems, such as provoking cancer or an immune response.
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