Young scientists collaborating with CRISPR impresario Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, generally don’t envision mucking about with groundwater teeming with all manner of microscopic beasts. But there they were, analyzing water samples from the abandoned Iron Mountain gold and silver mine in northern California, from an old uranium mine in Colorado, and from a frigid geyser in Utah, in each case running a “metagenomic analysis,” sequencing the genome of every one of the aquatic residents.
It’s like panning for biological gold, and the result was an 18-karat treasure, Doudna and her colleagues announced on Monday: a CRISPR protein different from any previously known, able to edit human genomes like a charm, and with properties that could make it a workhorse of therapeutic editing.
“Many labs are busily looking through [genomic] databases for CRISPR proteins, but it’s rare to find one that’s useful for genome editing,” said Doudna. The new enzyme, described in a paper in Nature and called CasX for now (it will likely be called Cas12e, but the Cas nomenclature is a hot mess), not only edits human genes in cells growing in lab dishes, she and her colleagues found. It also has properties that could allow it to enter human cells more readily than the commonly used CRISPR-Cas9 and replace disease-causing segments of DNA with healthy chunks.
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