Genotoxic Effects of Base and Prime Editing
By Kamal Nahas,
The Scientist
| 01. 12. 2024
New gene editing tools could become gamechangers for gene therapy, but scientists need to develop new approaches that curtail undesirable mutations. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 system is one such error-prone editing tool that scientists later modified to limit its mutational burden.1 However, it’s unclear how the adapted techniques, called base and prime editing, stack up against the original CRISPR-Cas9 system.2 Reporting in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute revealed that base and prime editing produced more mutations than previously suggested but produced them less often than CRISPR-Cas9.3
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing relies on a guide RNA that binds to a desired DNA sequence and a Cas9 enzyme that cuts both strands of DNA at that site, creating a double-strand break. Scientists edit the sequences at the cut ends before using different approaches to guide repair. However, there are often additional DNA sequences with blunt ends in the nucleus that could accidentally get jumbled with the cut ends during repair, leading to mutations. Therefore, researchers adapted CRISPR-Cas9 techniques...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...