Base Editors Cause Off-Target Mutations in RNA

A new study indicates that the modified CRISPR-Cas9 technology will need to be further refined before it can safely be used for research and therapeutic applications.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Base editors designed to convert one DNA nucleotide to another may also perform large numbers of unwanted edits to RNA, according to a study published earlier this week (April 17) in Nature. Although base editing was touted as a more precise genome-editing approach than more traditional methods, researchers in the US found that the technique appears to cause widespread changes to the transcriptome of human cells, suggesting that the technology needs more work before it can be used reliably in research and therapeutics.

“Most investigation of off-target base editing has focused on DNA, but we have found that this technology can induce large numbers of RNA alterations as well,” study coauthor J. Keith Joung of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School says in a statement. “This surprising finding suggests the need to look at more than just genetic alterations when considering unintended off-target effects of ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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