It's Prime Time for a New Gene Editor

摘要

>CRISPR may have generated a lot of buzz this year, but some researchers are already looking beyond it to the next new gene-editing technique. Say hello to prime editing. "If CRISPR is like scissors ... then you can think of prime editors like word processors," said chemist David Liu in an October press briefing, He spoke days ahead of the first-ever prime editing study, published in Nature and authored by Liu and his team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University. Liu explained that, while CRISPR cuts through DNA's double helix to snip out genes, prime editing searches for and replaces targeted genes without such slicing and dicing, reducing the risk of unintended changes to the genetic code.