CRISPR/Cas on video
See CRISPR with your own eyes
Anna Kaznadzei, N+1
The topic of CRISPR has been popping up so often lately that it becomes even somehow inconvenient not to know about the simplest principles of operation of these systems. In the short video below, scientists and 3D animators clearly show what exactly molecules do, the mechanism of which lies, in particular, at the heart of many modern methods of genomic editing.
CRISPR is a genome editing system from Visual Science on Vimeo.
CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a cluster of short palindromic repeats evenly separated by inserts. Its function in nature is quite complex, although elegant – it is a system that is able to "record" in the genome of a bacterium pieces of the genome of viruses, so that when the virus enters the cell to recognize it and cut it into pieces. In fact, this is a kind of address book (or even a "death notebook"), in which pieces of potentially dangerous DNA (spacers) are listed in order and separated by identical delimiter inserts (repeats). Next to this book, proteins are encoded in the genome, which, in fact, perform the work of recording, recognizing and cutting border violators.
The exact mechanism of action of all CRISPR-associated proteins (they are called "CRISPR-associated, or Cas-proteins") is not yet known (there are quite a lot of them), however, scientists managed to successfully modify and make them work for themselves. The most famous at the moment, perhaps, is the CRISPR/Cas9 tool, which is associated with a huge amount of research. With this system, scientists can, for example, find a given DNA sequence, make a cut into it and replace one nucleotide with another. In addition, the system can be configured so that it does not cut DNA, but only modifies its work at a given locus or, for example, simply serves as a fluorescent label and indicates its location.
Such opportunities have opened up a lot of prospects in terms of DNA research, treatment of hereditary diseases (for example, they will help to combat sickle cell anemia and Duchenne myodystrophy), the construction of specified characteristics in organisms (including agricultural plants or industrial bacteria) and much more. In 2016, the United States allowed experiments with editing the human genome for the first time. Shortly after, the first genome editing studies were conducted in human embryos.
We previously talked in more detail about this and other CRISPR systems with Professor Konstantin Severinov, the scientific curator of the project (you can read this conversation in our material); there we also discuss the problems of risks of genetic editing and the accuracy of CRISPR systems.
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