"We’re about to enter a golden age of genetic engineering, where huge advances in gene-editing technology are making it possible for scientists to tweak the DNA of different organisms with incredible, unprecedented precision.
Until just a few years ago, altering individual genes in everything from plant cells to mouse cells to human cells was a crude, laborious, and often futile process.
Now scientists have developed a technology called CRISPR/Cas9 (or CRISPR for short), which harnesses the immune system of bacteria to snip individual genes, either knocking them out or even inserting new ones in their place. (Here’s our full explainer on CRISPR, which is different from conventional genetic modification techniques.)
What’s impressive about CRISPR is how it’s transforming the work of so many scientists in so many different fields. Much of the important work is still in the proof-of-concept stage — for example, proving that you can use CRISPR to control transcription (making an RNA copy of a gene sequence), edit the epigenome, or image the genome in living cells. But as the details get worked out, scientists say they can imagine CRISPR becoming an incredibly powerful tool."
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