![]() ![]() You don’t need to be able to see the DNA in our genome through the microscope – it’s too small. ![]() Then it’s just a case of jiggling around until eventually the piece finds its way to the correct part of the puzzle and slots into the only place it fits. What you’d do is fabricate a jigsaw piece of precisely the right shape and inject it into the passionfruit. Or, you can punch holes in cells with electric currents and let these things just float in, use guns to shoot them in stuck-on tiny bullets, or introduce them encapsulated in bubbles of fat that fuse with the cell membrane and release their contents inside.īut how does the new gene find the right place to embed itself? Imagine you wanted to put in the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle with 3 billion pieces, and it’s inside a cell, filled with goop like a passionfruit. You can use a microscope and a tiny needle to inject the CRISPR/Cas9 together with the guide and the donor DNA, the new gene. Now we can edit life itself, we need to ask how we should use such technology If we inject new DNA it will take the place of the DNA we have cut. In order to target our Cas9 scissors, we link them to an artificial guide that directs them to the matching segment of DNA. The CRISPR part of the name comes from repeat DNA sequences that were part of a complex system telling the scissors which part of the DNA to cut. And that is basically what we use.Ĭas9 is the technical name for the virus-destroying “scissors” that evolved in bacteria. So, all we need is a giant microscope and a tiny pair of scissors. ![]() We’d have to snip out millions of genes and paste in millions of new ones.Īnd not all cells are easy to get to – how could we reach cells buried in our bones or deep within a brain?Ī better approach is to start at the beginning and edit the genome while there is only one cell – a very early embryo. There is no point editing just one cell: we would have to edit the same gene in every single cell. We first have to remember that animals and plants are composed of millions of cells, and each cell contains the same DNA. So do we just snip the unwanted gene out and replace it with a good one? Or, in some cases, we may want to enhance the genetic code of crops, livestock or perhaps even people. We might want to correct a disease-causing error that was inherited or crept into our DNA when it replicated. Today we’ve adapted this molecular machinery for an entirely different purpose – to change any chosen letter(s) in an organism’s DNA code. ![]()
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