GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

CRISPR Genome Editing

2012 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Bacteria keep pieces of the viruses that have attacked them and use them to recognise the next attack. Turning that memory into a tool meant supplying the recognition sequence yourself: a guide RNA finds whatever stretch of DNA it has been written to match, and the Cas9 enzyme cuts there. It was working in human cells within a year.

Why it matters

For the first time a species can rewrite genomes on purpose, including its own. What made this method spread where earlier ones did not is that the targeting is written rather than built: changing what you edit means changing a short piece of RNA, not engineering a new protein.

Sources

1. Jinek et al. (2012), Science · A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity
2. Cong et al. (2013), Science · Multiplex genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas systems
3. Doudna & Charpentier (2014), Science · The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.9997266 µs before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day