Work

Of mice and CRISPR

Year: 2017

Type: article

Abstract: The usefulness of a specific technology often hits a ceiling based on technical limitations. Then, a single advance, frequently orthogonal to the core methodology, dramatically expands the utility of this technology. The effectiveness of early surgeons wielding a scalpel was severely limited by how much a patient could withstand the pain of an operation. Anesthesia was the core discovery that permitted surgery to become a consistently effective medical intervention. Molecular cloning was a powerful technology to understand the importance of genes in biology, but it had limited utility in population genetics and in medicine, because of the arduous requirements for cloning a single gene. The invention of polymerase chain reaction dramatically expanded the utility of molecular biology into high‐throughput sequencing, epidemiology, forensics, diagnostics, and gene therapy. We believe that the advent of powerful gene editing technologies such as the CRISPR/CAS system will be this transformative technology for murine genetics.

Source: EMBO Reports

DOI: 10.15252/embr.201643717