This Incredible Video Shows CRISPR Editing DNA
DNA-editing tool CRISPR has arrived and it's not going anywhere, but the concept of DNA-editing — and the ethical quandaries it will create — still seem pretty vague to most of us non-scientists.
But this video, created by Japanese researcher Osamu Nureki's lab, might help make things a bit more concrete — it shows Cas9-RNA, the enzyme that does CRISPR's "cutting," slicing a strand of DNA in two:
[Via The Atlantic]
Now that you've seen it in action, it's a good time to revisit Michael Specter's excellent piece for The New Yorker about CRISPR's promise and danger:
Until CRISPR came along, biologists lacked the tools to force specific genetic changes across an entire population. But the system, which is essentially a molecular scalpel, makes it possible to alter or delete any sequence in a genome of billions of nucleotides. By placing it in an organism's DNA, scientists can insure that the new gene will copy itself in every successive generation. A mutation that blocked the parasite responsible for malaria, for instance, could be engineered into a mosquito and passed down every time the mosquito reproduced. Each future generation would have more offspring with the trait until, at some point, the entire species would have it.
There has never been a more powerful biological tool, or one with more potential to both improve the world and endanger it.