New Tool Guides Selection of Best Gene-Editing Option

Researchers have developed a new tool that will allow them to choose the best available gene-editing option for a given job, making the use of CRISPR technology cheaper, and more efficient. The collaborative study was published in Nature Biotechnology.

"We designed a new method that tests the specificity of these different CRISPR enzymes—how precise they are—robustly against any changes to the DNA sequence that could misdirect them, and in a cleaner way than has ever been done before," said co-author Steve Jones. The collaborative research group included scientists from The University of Texas, the University of California, and Korea University.

Since each CRISPR enzyme has strengths and weaknesses in editing different sequences, the team set out to create a tool to help scientists compare the different enzymes and find the best one for a given job. "CRISPR wasn't designed in a lab. It wasn't made by humans for humans. It was made by bacteria to defend against viruses," said researcher John Hawkins. "There is incredible potential for its use in medicine, but the first rule of medicine is 'do no harm.' Our work is trying to make CRISPR safer."

The team developed a library of DNA sequences and measured how accurate each CRISPR enzyme was, how long it took the enzyme to edit the sequences, and how precisely they edited the sequence. For some tasks the commonly used enzyme CRISPR-Cas9 worked best; in others, different enzymes performed much better. "It's like a standardized test," Hawkins said. "Every student gets the same test, and now you have a benchmark to compare them."

This new tool not only allows scientists to choose the best enzyme for editing on the first try, but it also provides them with information about where mistakes are most likely to occur for each enzyme, saving time. "This technique gives us a new way to reduce risk," Jones said. "It allows gene edits to be more predictable."