Universal genome cutters: from selfish genetic elements to antivirus defence and genome editing tools

摘要

Over the last 3 years, the new generation of genome editing and engineering tools based on the bacterial CRISPR-Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR associated proteins) has attracted enormous attention in both the scientific community and the popular media. Although exaggerations certainly cannot be avoided along the way, the enthusiasm is well justified. Indeed, CRISPR-Cas provides a means to cut into any DNA molecule at any desirable site with an unprecedented, virtually perfect specificity, thus making realistic nearly any genome modification at a minimal expense of time and resources. The CRISPR-Cas systems present one of those rare, truly lucky cases where a fundamental discovery that changes our ideas of how evolution works is also of immense practical value.