The CRISPR/Cas9 system, part of the bacterial immune response, has become well-known for its applications in DNA editing. But even as animal trials using CRISPR/Cas9 to treat genetic conditions begin, researchers are still discovering new types of natural CRISPR sequences.
The latest is unique: It targets not DNA, but RNA. The system, discovered in the oral bacterium Leptotrichia shahii, is the first CRISPR found to specifically target RNA alone.
That is important, says study researcher Eugene Koonin, a senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, because the RNA-targeting tool appears to be involved in programmed cell death. This cellular suicide process destroys an infected cell before it can infect others.
If the RNA-targeting tool turns out to work in animals, it might be possible to target specific genes expressed by mutated cells, and, one day, to treat cancer.
“This would obviously offer interesting prospects in the targeted killing of, let us say, tumor cells,” Koonin says. “But this is very challenging to actually realize.”
CRISPR sequences are a bacterial...
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