Ever since CRISPR’s discovery, it has created a boom in research in the field of gene editing, be it for metabolic engineering or for medical purposes. It has become one of the important gene editing tools and its use in medicine can actually help in the treatment of various life-threatening genetic disorders, like sickle cell anaemia. It has proven to be extremely useful in metabolic engineering for the production of commercially significant products.
The discovery of CRISPR was based on human pro streptococcus bacteria and this got Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Dudna the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2020.
To begin, what exactly is CRISPR?
Clustered regularly interspaced short pallindromic repeats are the pathway in bacteria which provides immunity for the bacteria against viruses and plasmid DNA.
These repeats are specialized regions of DNA with two distinct features: the presence of nucleotide repeats and spacers, where repeated sequences of nucleotides are building blocks of DNA distributed throughout the crisper regions and spacers are bits of DNA interspaced between sequences.During viral infection, these regions are incorporated into the host, serving as a memory that, upon re-infection, recognizes the virus during a future attack.It accomplishes this by chopping up and destroying the DNA with the help of a protein known as cas9.Guide RNA and cas9 nuclease work together as a tool, with guide Rna consisting of crRNA and tracrRNA, which are found in duplex form naturally but are modified into a single RNA called sgRNA.
They started the use of CRISPR with the industrial production of succinate in cyano bacteria. Now, researchers have reached the stage where they are using this tool to fix the cholesterol in monkeys, which was reported recently.
One recent study found that injecting CRISPR into six people suffering from a genetic disorder had a significant effect on them. research involved a mutation in the TTR gene, which produces a transthyretin protein in the liver, responsible for connecting the brain and spinal cord to the muscles and sensory cells. Transthyretin amyloidosis is a disease caused by abnormal accumulation of transthyretin.
In other research, they developed a drought-resistant CRISPR technique. The state of the earth is critical for problem solving, and if genetic engineering can help with modern issues, that would be the best thing a scientist can do to serve their own purpose in life.
Article by
Pragya,
BioPsych BIoscience
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