New ‘Prime’ Genome Editor Could Surpass CRISPR
22nd October 2019
CRISPR, an extraordinarily powerful genome-editing tool invented in 2012, can still be clumsy. It sometimes changes genes it shouldn’t, and it edits by hacking through both strands of DNA’s double helix, leaving the cell to clean up the mess—shortcomings that limit its use in basic research and agriculture and pose safety risks in medicine. But a new entrant in the race to refine CRISPR promises to steer around some of its biggest faults. “It’s a huge step in the right direction,” chemist George Church, a CRISPR pioneer at Harvard University, says about the work, which appears online today in Nature.