Cas13a bound to and cleaving single-stranded RNA.STEPHEN DIXONBack in 2016, scientists uncovered CRISPR proteins that bind and cleave single-stranded RNA, rather than DNA. Now, the same team from MIT has tweaked the system, called CRISPR-Cas13a, to work in mammalian cells.
“Prior to CRISPR, RNAi was the holy grail with respect to ways to modulate gene expression,” notes Mitchell O’Connell, who works on RNA-targeting CRISPR at the University of Rochester and who was not involved in the work. “But one of the big benefits of Cas13a is that it appears to be more specific and that the system is not native to mammalian cells, so you are less likely to perturb natural post-transcriptional network within the cells, in contrast to RNAi, which coopts endogenous machinery to carry out gene knockdown.”
In a paper published today (October 4) in Nature, MIT’s Feng Zhang and colleagues show the RNA-cleaving Cas13a enzyme (previously called C2c2) can specifically knock down levels of both endogenous and reporter RNAs in mammalian cells.
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