Editorial: Genome editing for all

CRISPR-Cas genome editing technology is attracting a growing cadre of devotees. In the past 18 months, over 125 papers on the technology have been published. At least three commercial ventures have been founded around the platform. And last month, the University of California (UC) Berkeley, UC San Francisco and the Li Ka Shing Foundation launched the $12-million Innovative Genomics Initiative (IGI), which seeks to accelerate adoption of the technology. According to its website, IGI will be dedicated to “a revolutionary method of genome engineering based on the transformative discovery of Cas9, a programmable DNA binding and cleaving enzyme.” So just how transformative is CRISPR-Cas likely to be?

CRISPR, short for clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats, is the name of a genomic locus in some bacteria and archaea that functions as an adaptive immune system against invading phage or plasmids. The locus encodes an endonuclease and stores snippets of foreign sequence, which are transcribed into RNAs that guide the endonuclease by base complementarity to cleave foreign nucleic acids at specific sequences. Type II CRISPR systems use the endonuclease Cas9 and...