CRISPR Cas 9: A step towards mutants?

As a child I watched and loved the X-Men series of films and would often think of humans could possess supernatural powers by having certain changes in their cell structure. Well, we are no where near developing humans with supernatural powers, Yet genetic engineering has made some great technological advancements that can be a boon for humanity. One of these is CRISPR. CRISPR is a technology that has been developed to edit genes ! Yup, you heard it right.

The essence of CRISPR is simple: it’s a way of finding a specific bit of DNA inside a cell. After that, the next step in CRISPR gene editing is usually to alter that piece of DNA. However, CRISPR has also been adapted to do other things too, such as turning genes on or off without altering their sequence.

There were ways to edit the genomes of some plants and animals before the CRISPR method was unveiled in 2012 but it took years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. CRISPR has made it cheap and easy.

Use of CRISPR is already widespread and is used for scientific research, and very soon most of flora and fauna around us will definitely get influenced by CRISPR. In fact, some people already are binging on CRISPRed food not even knowing about it.

CRISPR technology also has the potential to completely transform the medicine sector . It would enable us to not only treat but also prevent the onset of many diseases. We can even use it to change the genomes of our children. China made efforts towards this but this move was labeled as risky and efforts halted thereafter.

The key to CRISPR is the many flavours of “Cas” proteins found in bacteria, where they help defend against viruses. The Cas9 protein is the most widely used by scientists. This protein can easily be programmed to find and bind to almost any desired target sequence, simply by giving it a piece of RNA to guide it in its search.

When the CRISPR Cas9 protein is added to a cell along with a piece of guide RNA, the Cas9 protein hooks up with the guide RNA and then moves along the strands of DNA until it finds and binds to a 20-DNA-letter long sequence that matches part of the guide RNA sequence. That’s impressive, given that the DNA packed into each of our cells has six billion letters and is two metres long.


So far scientists have used it to reduce the severity of genetic deafness in mice, suggesting it could one day be used to treat the same type of hearing loss in people. They’ve created mushrooms that don’t brown easily and edited bone marrow cells in mice to treat sickle-cell Anemia. Down the road, CRISPR might help us develop drought-tolerant crops and create powerful new antibiotics. CRISPR could one day even allow us to wipe out entire populations of malaria-spreading mosquitoes or resurrect once-extinct species like the passenger pigeon.What happens next can vary. The standard Cas9 protein cuts the DNA at the target. When the cut is repaired, mutations are introduced that usually disable a gene. This is by far the most common use of CRISPR. It’s called genome editing – or gene editing – but usually the results are not as precise as that term implies.

CRISPR can also be used to make precise changes such as replacing faulty genes – true genome editing – but this is far more difficult.

Customised Cas proteins have been created that do not cut DNA or alter it in any way, but merely turn genes on or off: CRISPRa and CRISPRi respectively. Yet others, called base editors, change one letter of the DNA code to another.

So why do we call it CRISPR? Cas proteins are used by bacteria to destroy viral DNA. They add bits of viral DNA to their own genome to guide the Cas proteins, and the odd patterns of these bits of DNA are what gave CRISPR its name: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

CRISPR though highly useful posseses a few ethical challenges as well. Some of this includes its ill usage to enhance normal human traits such as height or intelligence and also wrong genetic mutations could lead to a rise in cancer cases.

So, CRISPR is similar to a nuclear weapon. Possessing a nuclear weapon can wither deter wars between two countries and can also annihilate races (in context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Its upto us, how we use this technology



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