BY ANNELIESE MOLL
For the UAS Whalesong
Earlier this semester, I wrote a brief article about GMOs. Within it, I mentioned that humans have been slowly modifying organisms for thousands of years. Since the discovery of DNA, the technology and methods used to understand and edit DNA have changed and improved. CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, are segments of prokaryotic DNA that have short repetitions of base sequences. Cas9 is an associated enzyme.
In December of 1987, CRISPR sequences were found, but not characterized, in E. coli. Eight years later these sequences are found in other microbes. Jump to 2007: a Danish food company called Danisco found that these sequences are part of a bacterial defense against viruses. In 2011 several biotech companies started to utilize this new technology, focusing on agriculture, therapeutics, and more research. The following year it is reported that scientists are able to use CRISPR to edit genomes. More energy is placed on researching therapeutics in several locations worldwide, and CRISPR has begun to be heavily used with mouse and human cells. During March of 2015 the first report of the CRISPR gene drive that is able to spread a modified gene rapidly. Earlier this year a group of researchers edited human embryos. Continue reading “CRISPR – Cas9”