Life, The Remix

by Alice Park,

A new technique that lets scientists edit DNA with ease.

Sometime soon, Kathy Niakan, [in her] laboratory at London’s Francis Crick Institute, will place a human embryo on the platform of her microscope. With one hand, she will steady the embryo–an egg that has been fertilized by a sperm but hasn’t yet begun the cell division that eventually leads to a person. With the other, she will maneuver a tiny pipette up against the embryo and inject a specially prepared liquid. If all goes as expected, the liquid will alter the DNA at the core of the cell–literally rewriting the embryo’s genetic code. At that point, Niakan will have effectively edited this potential human being. She isn’t interested in creating designer humans; instead, she’s trying to learn how healthy humans are made, by identifying which DNA sequences are crucial to helping a human embryo develop normally.

what’s truly remarkable is that her work represents just one front of a broad revolution in genetics sparked by the technique called CRISPR-Cas9. Just four years old, this discovery is transforming research into how to treat disease, what we eat and how we’ll generate electricity, fuel our cars and even save endangered species. Experts believe that CRISPR can be used to reprogram the cells not just in humans but also in plants, insects–practically any piece of DNA on the planet. On June 2, a scientist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute announced the development of a related CRISPR technique that can edit RNA, which is responsible for regulation and expression of genes. If DNA is the genetic alphabet, RNA spells actual words. In plain terms, that means the already vast possibilities for CRISPR got even bigger.

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